Eva Husson’s Girls of the Sun is a feminist war movie: impassioned, suspenseful, angry. For some, its robust action-film rhetoric will sit ill with contemporary issues and events — a rhetoric which might otherwise pass unnoticed in a conventionally peopled movie about, say, fighting for the allies in the second world war. Like that sort of film, Girls of the Sun is unsophisticated enough to be sure where right and wrong are placed, and incidentally to have faith in the efficacy of warzone journalism. We have all learned a shrugging cynicism about journalists who are “embedded”. Girls of the Sun begs to differ. For me it is heartfelt, forthright and muscular.
The movie is a fictional story, based on the true story of an all-female Kurdish combat unit fighting in 2014 to reclaim territory from the incel-fascists and rape-enthuasiasts of Isis. And this female unit is to discover that it is armed with a powerful and morale-boosting weapon unavailable to any other combatant: the Jihadis’ terrified conviction that being killed by a woman is a dishonour and humiliation that will send them straight to hell. For the first time in their lives, these women realise that men are afraid of them.
Golshifteh Farahani plays Bahar, a former professional lawyer and university graduate in northern Iraq, once captured with her husband and son when Isis warriors swarmed into town in their black pickups, accessorised with machine-guns. She was sold into domestic sex slavery, her husband beaten and killed and young son sent off to be trained as a child soldier. Meanwhile, Emmanuelle Bercot plays Mathilde, a French war reporter who has lost an eye in Homs and has now come to Iraq in what may seem a reckless further throw of the professional dice. This persona is evidently inspired by the real-life figure of the American foreign correspondent Marie Colvin who lost her eye in the Sri Lankan civil war in 2001 and affected an eye patch until her death in Homs in 2014. Mathilde comes out to the front, with her minders and fixers, and is naturally fascinated by what a great story the all-female unit is.
Her liaison officer provocatively raises the question of “propaganda” when they are all introduced — a question that nettles everyone. But they have little lasting interest in the issue. Mathilde, is after all, effectively to go into a combat zone with them without a weapon. And it is here, before the big push begins, that she meets Bahar, and it is in flashback that we learn the story of her capture and how she masterminded her escape with a hidden mobile phone.
Her male commander infuriates Bahar: a man who is content to wait for the American-led coalition to call in airstrikes, though Bahar is enough of a military person to see the ultimate importance of those. But she claims that the very threat of these airstrikes has caused alarm and despondency amidst the enemy, and the Kurds are in a position to make a bold strike right away and crucially to rescue civilian captives who will almost certainly be murdered en masse as Isis retreats. Reluctantly, the commander lets Bahar and her unit go ahead as commandos.
The scenes where Bahar makes her escape with other women (one pregnant) and the later scene in which the now careworn warrior Bahar leads a military sortie into a tunnel — these are straight-ahead action scenes, without much in the way of subtlety. But they are well-orchestrated and effective. There is no irony here. I found myself, weirdly, thinking of the revolutionary Women’s Battalion of Death in Sergei Eisenstein’s October — a battalion which is in fact satirised by Eisenstein. These women are not satirised, and they are not dramatically subject to that continued exposure to war which will eventually make any soldier, male or female, desensitised to the business of killing. The film halts with their provisional victory, and yes, it may seem naïve, but then there is naivety in believing there is no plausible way of showing good triumphing. Girls of the Sun is partisan and it wears its heart on its sleeve: a powerful, forceful story.
