I have to admit that The Breadwinner is an animation that I thought about for a long time and with which I had quite a big problem. One could expect non-disdainful approach to (not only) younger audiences and a seriously taken topic in the spirit of Tomm Moore’s fables (who in this case served as a producer).
We have a pretty charismatic story told – the realities of some unnamed Middle Eastern state, the war atmosphere, the Taliban, oppressive laws, and bans. One-legged father must support his family: wife, two daughters, and a babbling baby-son. Due to the fact that women cannot show themselves outside the home, because they cannot draw attention to themselves, he takes for help his growing youngest daughter, who theoretically should not present a problem before the law. At some point, the police (a group of home-grown Taliban guards) notice Parvana, claiming that she is already at such an age that she should not appear in public. They take the father to prison. From now on the youngest daughter will have to try to support her family on her own.
The masculine, brutal world is told from a woman’s perspective and with the addition of a classic dress-up motif (I am stopping here so as not to spoil the fun). Here women must cope in a world where any question for help can provoke a blow to the face, beating or taking to jail. And at some level this is what The Breadwinner is about – inequality between the sexes, the difficulty of being a woman in a world engulfed by blind fanaticism.
But men do not act as a collective antagonist here. There is no clear division into black and white. Gender is not evaluated in any way. Nothing is exaggerated. Not all men are evil – let’s take, for example, the figure of a father (who in the past was at war and belonged to a group of fanatics, but there was a change in him and he became a gentle teacher who values peace) or a man who helps Parvana, or the hero of a tale narrated by Parvana’s friend (story about a boy with a good heart). Women, in turn, have to cope in this brutal world, but they are not heroins, they rather persist like trees, although under the pressure of a war storm. Exaggeration, heroism, adventure occur only in the box, a fairy tale in a fairy tale – in Parvana’s stories (by the way, the function of this box is to show the soothing power of the story, words, support and a clear definition of the border between not-such-fairytale reality and fiction).
Ideology turns out to be the real enemy. It is ideology in the first place that drives the war machine, it is ideology that stands behind fanaticism, restrictions, violence and blind subordination. It is ideology that makes even those who want to see themselves as executors of ideology become its victims.
So what lies behind some of the characters being able to resist the compelling action of ideology? All those who oppose it were somehow hurt by it. They lost something that was most precious to them. The Parvana family is particularly marked here: from the father who carries the stigma of war, through the main character who discovers the difference between reality and fiction (something that everyone goes through growing up), to the family secret that in the film is not articulated directly, although it appears in the form of a guess in one of Parvana’s stories. Similarly, the donor who helps the heroine does it against the ideology that took away something that was most important to him.
The driving force behind the characters opposing the destructive power of ideology is the attempt to recover this “something”. This “something” can be – attention, there is pathos here – for example, freedom, sacrifice, family, peace, or universal values that only gain meaning in the face of loss and suffering. Without realizing how ideology works, they remain only empty slogans used by apologists of ideology (“we will fight for tradition, family, freedom, peace, etc.”). Only those who have lost something – or have a disadvantaged position – can see injustice and distinguish empty slogans from reality.
The Breadwinner is an extremely subtle film, hiding its opposition to the injustice of the world (not only war-torn Eastern regions, but also inequalities present in the West) behind the box. The story of the Parvana family is told parallelly to the fairy tale told by the heroine – a fairy tale that has a much greater connection with reality than it may seem at first (but this should be left to each viewer to discover for himself). As usual, when I watch something that Tomm Moore was involved in, I’m not disappointed.
