The co-writer of The Breadwinner (2017), Anita Doron — it isn’t really fair to define an artist by a single work, since she has done many other things besides, but I have to say it because it is one of her best-known works — is back with Maya & Samar. From its very first minutes the film makes you feel it is going to be a bold one. No, the reason I call it bold is not the blowjob scene in the opening. I am talking about the way the story suddenly jumps from a bar in Canada to Kabul, Afghanistan. That transition is a sign, from the first minute, that you will be watching the stories of two women living in very different worlds and that the film will try to say something political about the differences between those two worlds. Moreover, the fact that a writer who told the story of a girl living in Afghanistan so successfully in The Breadwinner has returned to the subject of Afghanistan was one of the things that raised my expectations for the film. But frankly, I am not sure how far those high expectations were met.
Maya is a young journalist in Toronto who writes about sex and pop culture for an independent website. She comes to Athens on holiday to see her old friend Rebecca. While spending time with Rebecca, her husband and their neighbour Yan, Yan takes her to an electronic music party on the edge of the city. There, on the dance floor, Maya sees Samar. Samar is a queer Afghan woman who fled the Taliban, sought refuge in Greece, has no legal papers and makes a living dancing in clubs in Athens. Maya is drawn to her, later finds her at the club where she works, and the two begin a brief but intense relationship.
One of the less convincing aspects of the film is how these two people form such a deep bond in such a short time. More importantly, there is something uncomfortable about the relationship from the start. Because Maya, a Western woman, has never experienced real religious and social oppression the way Samar has, her interest in Samar inevitably becomes questionable. Maya seems more interested in Samar’s story than in Samar herself. And Samar really does have an interesting story: she fled the Taliban, left her country, and is trying to survive in another country without papers. Part of Maya’s curiosity is less about forming a genuine connection with what Samar has lived through than about the fact that all of it offers her an interesting story. At certain moments it is even possible to compare Maya’s approach to Samar with the instinct of someone who wants to help a poor person.
This approach also shows itself in Maya’s desire to write Samar’s story. After Samar is attacked by an Afghan man, Maya records the incident and later wants to write Samar’s story. But publication of the piece causes trouble for Samar because her face is clearly visible in the video. At first Maya is proud of having done a good piece of journalism and feels no regret. When Samar disappears, however, things change and Maya starts looking for her.
When she finds Samar we learn that the truth is completely different: Samar planned the attack herself. She asked a male friend to beat her and used the resulting video in her asylum application to open a path to another country. So there is a rather interesting situation here: while Maya uses Samar’s story to advance her own journalism career and visibility, Samar uses Maya as part of her own survival plan. Two women who at first look morally very different from each other turn, by the end of the story, into two people who use each other.
I think this is where the film becomes interesting. Because it is not only a “Western woman tries to save a refugee woman” story. There is also a relationship in which both sides use the other for their own purposes, and it becomes hard to separate who is truly the victim and who is truly the exploiter. But Maya & Samar does not go far enough into this quite interesting moral conflict. Because you never form a strong enough bond with the characters and the world they inhabit, the reversal that appears at the end does not produce the intended effect.
Instead the film is quite busy moving us from one sex scene to the next. That the sex scenes are explicit and bold is not a problem in itself. But this narrative style, which at times approaches the structure of Blue Is the Warmest Colour, gets in the way of the far more interesting issues the film has in its hands. Because Maya & Samar actually has a story that could tell much more than sex and passion. Privilege, refugee status, journalistic ethics, saviourism, and people using one another for their own ends are already present in the film as deep subjects on which a great deal could be said. But they are never treated with enough depth. That is why Maya & Samar feels like a film that does not quite know what it wants to say. Doron’s courage is certainly admirable; but alongside that courage I struggle to find an equally strong narrative and intellectual depth.
