In Competition

Samira Makhmalbaf returns to Cannes, where her "Blackboards" won a Special Jury Prize in 2000, with "Panj E Asr" (At Five in the Afternoon), an unsettling and uneven work in which we must make do with a few sequences that hit the bull's-eye and many more that can't even locate a target. The film will stir interest on the festival circuit because xof Makhmalbaf's name and its Afghan setting, the site of her father Mohsen Makhmalbaf's prescient feature "Kandahar" and her own contribution to "9/11/01," easily the best sequence in that compilation film.

After the fall of the Taliban regime in that impoverished country, a generational war breaks out between a young woman in Kabul who wishes to go to school and her father, a Taliban supporter who believes women should not venture into society. The woman, played by Agheleh Rezaie, who like everyone in the film is a nonprofessional actor, never directly defies her dad (Abdolgani Yousefrazi). Noqreh simply slips away off to school without wearing the school uniform so that he won't notice.

In her all-female class, the woman teacher asks who among her students wishes to become president of Afghanistan. Noqreh is among three who raise their hands. Each is to deliver a speech, and their classmates will vote on the most likely to succeed.

This gets Noqreh thinking about what it takes to win an election and what it means to be the president of a country. Her conversations with a young man, a poet (Razi Mohebi) clearly smitten with her, about the speech and politics in general, comprise the most interesting part of the story.

But even here, Makhmalbaf mistakes slowness and repetition for intensity. Gestures and action recur endlessly. The most annoying involves the woman's shoes. Noqreh changing from plain, practical black shoes to more feminine ones nicely represents the double life she is forced to lead. But the seventh or eighth time she does so, this comes to represent Makhmalbaf's inability to penetrate the woman's life any further.

Characters also tend to speak to one another not as human beings but as conduits of information to the audience about life in a destroyed country. At times, the movie threatens to turn into a documentary.

One inspired sequence has the woman and the poet engage a United Nations soldier, who turns out to be French, in conversation about politics. Here, the screenplay by Makhmalbaf and her father displays a welcome wit and playfulness.

But then the film takes a right turn into the barren countryside for a denouement that is both tragic and implausible. Tired of the "blasphemy" he sees everywhere in Kabul, the father drags his daughter, her sister-in-law and her missing brother's baby into this no man's land. Noqreh goes along without a whimper of protest.

This may well reflect the Makhmalbafs' attitude toward a male-dominated society where tradition and ignorance overrule logic and human experience. But dramatically, it makes an ill-fitting end to the story of a young woman who wants to become Afghanistan's first woman president.

Technically, the film leans toward neo-realism, an approach that may suggest the difficulties of shooting in a country with no cinema tradition as much as an aesthetic choice.

AT FIVE IN THE AFTERNOON/PANJ E ASR
A Makhmalbaf Film House/Wild Bunch/Bac Films Co-production
Credits:
Director: Samira Makhmalbaf
Screenwriters: Samira Makhmalbaf, Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Producer: Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Executive producer: Syamak Alagheband Director of photography: Ebrahim Ghafori
Music: Mohammed Reza Dar Vishi
Editor: Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Cast:
Noqreh: Agheleh Rezaie
The father: Abdolgani Yousefrazi
The poet: Razi Mohebi
The sister-in-law: Marzieh Amiri
Running time -- 106 minutes
No MPAA rating