kenwest

The Boxing Girls of Kabul is an engrossing glimpse into post-Taliban Afghanistan, where life is freer than before, but women can still be stoned and hung for perceived immorality. The 3 young boxers are both encouraged and criticized, and as such demonstrate the precarious state of social pressure in a poor, religious, fractured country. Their fathers and their coach, despite serious threats against them, are all determined that the girls have the right to fight, and so seem similar to the father of Malala Yousafzai -- liberal people in an oppressive society.

In the narrative itself, the girls are at once inspiring. brave, naive, unrealistic, and seen through a certain lens, pathetic. With only amateur training, few resources, primitive equipment, and not even a ring in which to spar, their hopeful trips to tournaments in Vietnam and Kazakhstan become sobering collisions with reality, facing better trained, faster, fitter girls.

So, a story about the human condition, about brave young people, about coping in a hostile society, all in 50 fascinating minutes. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada, it is on Netflix. It is worth seeing.

I'm sorry, but I do not understand most of the reviews here taking so much time on Mae West (not my aunt). This was the first movie in which I was aware of Constance Cummings, and for me, she makes it. Mae West is an amusing diversion, a counterpoint to the core story, but it is not her movie. Constance Cummings is both gorgeous and icily, mysteriously seductive. In every one of her scenes. she fascinates and dominates.

Yes, it's fun to hear the first iteration of Mae's "goodness had nothing to do with it", and yes, the ending is simplistic and abrupt, but it was the Cummings character that kept me watching.