‘No Good Men’ Review: Unexpected Berlinale Opener Finds Love in a Hopeless Patriarchy
The opening credits of “No Good Men” play out over a profuse montage of cactus flowers blooming in rapid time-lapse abundance, their pastel petals billowing brightly over the plant’s thorny armor — set to an earwormy Pashtun-pop banger by Pakistani singer Nazia Iqbal. Rife with symbolic implications of beauty enduring against arid odds, the sequence is a deceptively fizzy sugar rush on which to begin a film that swings in tone from droll to somber throughout, without ever matching that initial exuberant peak. But this inconsistency is the point of an unusual, disarming third feature from Afghan writer-director-star Shahrbanoo Sadat, which repeatedly pits buoyant romantic comedy tropes against devastating crashes of realism.
An inspired choice of opening film for this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Sadat’s latest sits in a singular niche between arthouse crowd-pleaser — as it foregrounds a good-humored, slow-building workplace romance between two attractive, charismatic principals — and ripped-from-the-headlines downer, as it fretfully ponders how love, beauty or indeed anything and anyone might survive the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. Arguably a more universal commercial proposition than Sadat’s first two features, “Wolf and Sheep” and “The Orphanage” (both of which premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes), it’s nonetheless an adventurous tonal experiment that demands careful handling by distributors outside the festival-circuit hothouse.
Though she has remained behind the camera in her previous efforts, Sadat branches out in “No Good Men” to play protagonist Naru, an enterprising young camerawoman and single mother in Kabul. Recently separated from an abusive husband and struggling to carve out a career in the male-dominated hard-news sphere, she has every reason to resent the oppressive Afghan patriarchy — while for Sadat, as a female filmmaker in the same realm, it’s hard not to sense a degree of art-imitating-life commentary in her self-casting. She’s an appealing if somewhat unformed presence on screen, shouldering proceedings with the same air of honest, doughty determination that Naru brings to her profession.
With her girlfriends at work, Naru brooks no dissent when she flatly claims that there are “no good men” left in Afghanistan, insisting that the national culture has made misogynistic bullies of even their nearest and dearest male lovers and relatives. Her words are colored by both personal experience and political anxiety: The year is 2021, U.S. troops are withdrawing from Afghanistan and the promise of a surging Taliban offensive paints a grim picture for women’s rights in the country. Women gossip and banter freely in Sadat’s script, collapsing into giggles over a veiny, vibrating dildo in one standout scene, but their girl talk is underpinned by trauma from physical violence and direct systemic oppression.
Men, meanwhile, blithely wield that patriarchal power in their own locker-room joshing: Counseling a friend about how to pursue an elusive woman, one guy jokily suggests he “kidnap her, get her pregnant and see how she chases you.” If there’s any exception to Naru’s adamant rule, it might be Qodrat (Anwar Hashimi, working a particularly soulful variation on grizzled Clooney-esque charm), the star reporter at the TV network where she works, whose journalism stands for truth and justice against conservative state values and obfuscation. But he’s a dyed-in-the-wool sexist too: When, after pleading with her supervisor, Naru finally secures a job accompanying Qodrat on his field work, his first response is to request that a “real cameraman” replace her.
Thus does “No Good Men” tease a formula familiar from countless Hollywood romantic comedies, as the plucky female rookie proves herself to her older, more jaded male superior — the 20-year-age gap between Naru and Qodrat does not pass without comment — and they inevitably fall for each other in the process. But each time Sadat’s film seemingly succumbs to the fuzzy comforts of movie logic, real life gets brutally in the way. Near-kisses are halted not by cutesy disruptions but by juddering acts of terror; the complicating third corner of the love triangle isn’t a sad-sack boyfriend but an ex-husband out for vicious revenge.
The film’s sudden, disorienting swerves in style and mood are thus a feature rather than a bug. That doesn’t excuse every odd structural break in Sadat’s screenplay, however — including one particularly jarring chronological leap from a fraught second-act climax that may have viewers wondering if they somehow accidentally skipped ahead.
But “No Good Men” feels all the more textured and vitally of its moment for its flaws and lapses. It has the unfakeable air of a film made in genuinely urgent circumstances, which makes its emotional surges (including a heart-pounder of an ending that marries “Casablanca”-style romantic compromise to matters-of-life-and-death catharsis) feel hard-earned. “It’s your only chance,” one character says to another at a crucial moment — the kind of line that never rings true in the cushioned, chance-filled surroundings of most romantic comedies. Here, for once, we believe it.
An inspired choice of opening film for this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Sadat’s latest sits in a singular niche between arthouse crowd-pleaser — as it foregrounds a good-humored, slow-building workplace romance between two attractive, charismatic principals — and ripped-from-the-headlines downer, as it fretfully ponders how love, beauty or indeed anything and anyone might survive the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. Arguably a more universal commercial proposition than Sadat’s first two features, “Wolf and Sheep” and “The Orphanage” (both of which premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes), it’s nonetheless an adventurous tonal experiment that demands careful handling by distributors outside the festival-circuit hothouse.
Though she has remained behind the camera in her previous efforts, Sadat branches out in “No Good Men” to play protagonist Naru, an enterprising young camerawoman and single mother in Kabul. Recently separated from an abusive husband and struggling to carve out a career in the male-dominated hard-news sphere, she has every reason to resent the oppressive Afghan patriarchy — while for Sadat, as a female filmmaker in the same realm, it’s hard not to sense a degree of art-imitating-life commentary in her self-casting. She’s an appealing if somewhat unformed presence on screen, shouldering proceedings with the same air of honest, doughty determination that Naru brings to her profession.
With her girlfriends at work, Naru brooks no dissent when she flatly claims that there are “no good men” left in Afghanistan, insisting that the national culture has made misogynistic bullies of even their nearest and dearest male lovers and relatives. Her words are colored by both personal experience and political anxiety: The year is 2021, U.S. troops are withdrawing from Afghanistan and the promise of a surging Taliban offensive paints a grim picture for women’s rights in the country. Women gossip and banter freely in Sadat’s script, collapsing into giggles over a veiny, vibrating dildo in one standout scene, but their girl talk is underpinned by trauma from physical violence and direct systemic oppression.
Men, meanwhile, blithely wield that patriarchal power in their own locker-room joshing: Counseling a friend about how to pursue an elusive woman, one guy jokily suggests he “kidnap her, get her pregnant and see how she chases you.” If there’s any exception to Naru’s adamant rule, it might be Qodrat (Anwar Hashimi, working a particularly soulful variation on grizzled Clooney-esque charm), the star reporter at the TV network where she works, whose journalism stands for truth and justice against conservative state values and obfuscation. But he’s a dyed-in-the-wool sexist too: When, after pleading with her supervisor, Naru finally secures a job accompanying Qodrat on his field work, his first response is to request that a “real cameraman” replace her.
Thus does “No Good Men” tease a formula familiar from countless Hollywood romantic comedies, as the plucky female rookie proves herself to her older, more jaded male superior — the 20-year-age gap between Naru and Qodrat does not pass without comment — and they inevitably fall for each other in the process. But each time Sadat’s film seemingly succumbs to the fuzzy comforts of movie logic, real life gets brutally in the way. Near-kisses are halted not by cutesy disruptions but by juddering acts of terror; the complicating third corner of the love triangle isn’t a sad-sack boyfriend but an ex-husband out for vicious revenge.
The film’s sudden, disorienting swerves in style and mood are thus a feature rather than a bug. That doesn’t excuse every odd structural break in Sadat’s screenplay, however — including one particularly jarring chronological leap from a fraught second-act climax that may have viewers wondering if they somehow accidentally skipped ahead.
But “No Good Men” feels all the more textured and vitally of its moment for its flaws and lapses. It has the unfakeable air of a film made in genuinely urgent circumstances, which makes its emotional surges (including a heart-pounder of an ending that marries “Casablanca”-style romantic compromise to matters-of-life-and-death catharsis) feel hard-earned. “It’s your only chance,” one character says to another at a crucial moment — the kind of line that never rings true in the cushioned, chance-filled surroundings of most romantic comedies. Here, for once, we believe it.