Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Breadwinner
2017 · Nora Twomey · The Breadwinner on Sightlines
The hair comes off. The next morning a girl who was not allowed to cross the street alone crosses it, works, and brings food home. Nothing in Kabul has changed. The same law is in force, the same men stand in the same doorways. What changed is what the street believes about her body.
Nora Twomey builds everything on that exchange, and it's worth being exact about what kind of exchange it is. Parvana doesn't defeat anything. She finds no loophole. She produces a false boy and then does the work of keeping him plausible: the hair kept short, the voice kept low, the walk. Late in his second cinema book, Deleuze got interested in precisely this sort of character and gave him a name — the forger. A liar wants to get away with something and then stop. A forger makes a thing true by maintaining it, and pays that maintenance for the length of the film. Deleuze filed such films under what he called the powers of the false, meaning the false not as a moral failure but as a productive force: the power to make something that wasn't there. Read the disguise this way and it stops being a costume you wait to see fall off. It becomes the film's actual theory of how you live under a law that has no use for you.
The other half of the film performs the same operation at a different scale. Parvana tells her little brother a tale, and Twomey renders it in cut-paper collage: luminous, ornamental, lit from a source the daylight scenes don't have. Deleuze's word for this, in his chapters on political cinema, is fabulation — story-telling, legending. It's what he thought modern political film had left, once it could no longer address a people already formed and speaking. "The people are missing," he wrote, borrowing from Klee; the filmmaker's job becomes helping invent one. That sounds like theory until you notice how the film is made. It was voiced largely by actors of Afghan descent. The bacha posh practice it depicts is real, and older than the Taliban. The fabulation isn't the director's clever idea imposed from outside — it's a survival technique the culture already had, filmed by people from it.
The two registers stay apart, and this is Twomey's specific invention. Deleuze's most famous late concept is the crystal-image, where present and dream become impossible to tell from one another, and most films that nest a fantasy inside hardship are reaching for it — they want the two to bleed. Twomey refuses. The Kabul register is flat-planed, dust-colored, unsentimental. The tale is cut-paper. You always know which one you're in. That's not a failure of ambition; it's the argument. The tale is not a place Parvana escapes to. It is a place she goes to get something and carry back. Storytelling here isn't consolation, it's equipment.
What this does to narrative is stranger than it looks. Most cinema runs on what Deleuze called the movement-image: a person perceives a situation and acts to change it. The regime the film depicts is, functionally, a machine for cutting that circuit for half the population — a woman can perceive hunger perfectly well and can do nothing whatever about it, because she may not go out. That severed circuit is exactly where Deleuze located the birth of the time-image: the character who can only look. The Breadwinner declines that outcome. It keeps the old shape — an encompassing situation presses, a decisive act transforms it — but replaces the middle term. The act that resolves the situation is not strength or cunning. It's a fiction, held steady. An action film whose engine is a made-up person.
The flatness is inherited, and the debts are specific. Cartoon Saloon built its house style on The Secret of Kells, where illuminated-manuscript patterning replaces perspectival depth: frame-filling ornament, no distance. In Kells that flatness reads as luxury. Twomey turns it into confinement — a city drawn with nowhere to recede to. Song of the Sea worked out how to nest a mythic register inside a naturalistic present, which is the structural chassis here. The collage sequences run back through Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed, which invented the articulated cut-paper silhouette; through Kirikou and the Sorceress, which showed how to carry an oral folktale on flat decorative figures against ornamental backdrops; and through Azur & Asmar for the tiled, arabesque flat-color world. The named influence is Persepolis: a girl's-eye view of fundamentalist rule in high-contrast 2D, drawn from its author's own memory.
That line matters because of what animation doesn't have. Bazin grounded film realism in the photograph — the image as a mold taken from light off real things, which is why we half-believe documentary footage before we've decided anything about it. A drawing has none of that credit. It has to earn belief some other way. Persepolis earned it through testimony; The Breadwinner earns it through testimony plus refusal — the main register declines every ornamental comfort the studio is famous for. An Oscar nomination for a hand-drawn film about occupied Kabul is the industry's receipt for that: animation admitted, alongside live action, to the handling of recent and unfinished history.
Watch Parvana's walk once you know all this. Deleuze had a term for a posture that discloses a whole social arrangement rather than a personality — the gest. Her boy-gait is one. Hold it in your eye and the entire architecture of that city becomes readable in a gait. And then one question, which the film opens and doesn't shut: who is the tale actually for? She tells it to her brother. She keeps telling it when he isn't the one who needs it.
Concepts in play
- le faussaire (the forger) — Parvana cuts her hair and passes as a boy — a self she must forge and then maintain (hair, voice, gait) for the family to eat; the disguise is labor, not a trick.
- story-telling / legending — The tale Parvana spins for her little brother, rendered in luminous cut-paper collage, which the dossier calls the film's beating heart — storytelling as a tool for surviving hardship, not escape from it.
- the people are missing — An Irish studio's film about Taliban-ruled Kabul voiced largely by actors of Afghan descent, depicting the real bacha posh tradition — a people addressed as something to be carried into representation rather than assumed.
- the gest — The bacha posh body: the boy-walk and short hair are a posture that exposes the whole social arrangement of Taliban Kabul rather than a psychology.
- action-image, large form — An encompassing situation (occupied Kabul, a family with no one permitted to earn) presses until a decisive act — the haircut — transforms it; the film keeps the movement-image spine but substitutes a fiction for the heroic middle term.
- the encompasser — Kabul under the Taliban as a milieu drawn dust-colored and unsentimental, a total situation that dictates what any body in it may do.
- onirosign (dream-image) — The cut-paper story-within-the-story is invented, not remembered — a fantasy circuit with no localizable memory behind it, kept visually distinct from the realist register rather than blending into a crystal.
- the closed set (cadre) — The Cartoon Saloon house style inherited from The Secret of Kells — flat, frame-filling patterning replacing perspectival depth — turned here into a city with no distance to recede into.
- affective colour — Two colour worlds: the dust-colored flat realism of Kabul against the luminous, arabesque palette of the collage tale, each absorbing the feeling of its register.