Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada was 11 when he was chosen to play his first movie role, one of two Afghan boys — Hassan and Amir — who are friends in “The Kite Runner” (Dec. 14). Marc Forster’s adaptation of the 2003 best-selling novel by Khalid Hosseini is about the search for redemption by the adult Amir, years after betraying his boyhood companion. But in the lengthy flashback to the boys’ friendship, Ahmad, above, is so quietly powerful that his Hassan ranks among the great child performances on film.
As has been widely reported, the event that sets Amir’s betrayal in motion is the attack on Hassan by a posse of older boys whose leader rapes him; although the depiction of the rape on screen is discreet, it is expected to be so offensive to conservative Afghan sensibilities that both young actors and their families are leaving Afghanistan and moving to the United Arab Emirates at the expense of Paramount Vantage.
In the story the lower-caste Hassan accepts Amir’s fearful refusal to intervene; the betrayal that ruptures the boys’ relationship comes later. Hassan is both Amir’s best friend and his servant, and his loyalty is total. It’s the way that Ahmad handles the potentially conflicting aspects of his character that makes his performance so memorable.
Born to servitude, Hassan embraces his role in the social order. But in Ahmad’s portrayal, he is never servile. On the contrary he expresses Hassan’s disciplined sense of his obligations with a watchful calm and an un-self-conscious dignity that is touching and impressive. He also gives the role a bit of grumpy-old-man humor, as when he scowls at Amir for interrupting him in a rare moment of privacy. Even that scene has a double edge; he’s using the time to try to teach himself to read. And on those occasions when he gets to shed his yoke and just be a boy — playing shoot-’em-up with Amir or racing to retrieve his kite — Ahmad imbues the character with such headlong joy that he could crack a person’s heart.
Amir may have the power, but Hassan knows how the world works. It just doesn’t work for him.
