Afghan Luke (2011)

Directed by: Mike Clattenburg | 85 minutes | drama | Actors: Nick Stahl, Stephen Lobo, Ali Liebert, Anousha Alamian, Rahmat Azizi, Lewis Black, Steve Cochrane, Torrance Coombs, Colin Cunningham, Gary Gill, Pascale Hutton, Raj Lal, Ron Lea, Gary Levert, Meysam Motazedi, Hooshang Saadi, Vik Sahay, Jason Schombing, Emmanuel Shirinian, Pablo Silveira, Yuriy Sobeshchakov, Parm Soor, Timothy Webber, Nicolas Wright

‘Don’t go there, this is bat country!’ stammered a drug-fried Johnny Depp in “Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas” just as his partner threatens to take a wrong turn. The drug-induced paranoia of America’s gambling city seems miles away from bomb- and Taliban-infested Afghanistan, but in Mike Clattenburg’s mind, the two are suspiciously close.

As in the journey of writer Hunter S. Thompson to the Sodom & Gomorrah of the United States, in ‘Afghan Luke’ we follow a journalist who moves into an area where fact and fiction intertwine. Here too, everyday reality is one that is hard to comprehend. Death and destruction are constantly lurking as the locals get lost in daily escapades of drugs and confusion. It is a gray and fascinating image at the same time. Afghanistan as a macabre amusement park, that’s what director Clattenburg presents us here and just like in ‘Fear & Loathing’ it is the fascination for this spectacle that makes you keep watching.

Main character Luke is also attracted to this spectacle, although he initially does not realize this himself. Luke is a boy with principles, he wants to go to Afghanistan to show the world the truth. He wants to show that Western soldiers are just as capable of turning into monsters as the enemy they fight. Fueled by this principle, Luke sets out to follow the trail of the mysterious soldier ‘Freddy Krueger’, who is notorious for cutting off his victims’ fingers. What he actually finds, however, is a country and a population that have completely lost their way.

The way Mike Clattenburg portrays this story deserves praise and skepticism at the same time. Clattenburg could have easily gone the dramatic (and moralistic?) way by mainly showing the horrors that take place every day in Afghanistan. Instead, he approaches his subject lightly. On the contrary, he shows that in the midst of all the horrors, people also carry on with their daily lives. Although everyone is affected by the war and there is a certain madness among the population because of this, a lot of people also simply try to make the best of it despite the circumstances. A big part of Luke’s adventure is in the striking characters he meets during his journey, who all try to escape the reality around them in their own way.

The skepticism lies in the fact that Clattenburg does show a very limited ability to look at his own time. The tendency to regard Afghanistan as one big rollercoaster ride does indeed make for an entertaining film, but the conclusion that there is simply nothing to understand about the situation there may say more about the limited horizon of the maker than about the actual situation in a country. like Afghanistan. ‘Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas’ clearly inspired Clattenburg, but where, in addition to all the excesses, that film also manages to put its finger on the sore spot of the zeitgeist, ‘Afghan Luke’ lingers in the amusement park created by Clattenburg. That doesn’t detract from the film so much, but it does make it clear what else this film could have been.