Love and Dignity on the Brink of Collapse

Kabul, 2021. Naru is 25, has a young son, and holds a bitter conviction: in Afghanistan, there are no good men. She works as a camera operator on a television show where a male “expert” advises young women whose husbands cheat on or beat them for wearing “too much” makeup. The scene is almost absurd, yet brutal in its normalcy. Naru has recently moved back in with her parents after enduring her husband’s constant infidelities. However, she cannot officially divorce him: Afghan law allows the father to take custody of the child. Within that legal and cultural framework, inequality is not an excess but the very structure of the system.

This is the premise of No Good Men, written and directed by Afghan filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat, who also plays the protagonist. What might sound in summary like a melodrama or even a romantic comedy — a disillusioned young woman who meets an older journalist, married and with four children — becomes an intimate reflection on female dignity in a country on the brink of collapse. Naru asks to be reassigned to more “serious” work, away from the show that frustrates her. That is how she begins collaborating with Qodrat, a well-known reporter who initially underestimates her. A failed professional encounter gradually gives way to an unexpected closeness.

The film unfolds in the months leading up to the Taliban’s return to power. That historical imminence is not mere background but a constant pressure shaping every everyday gesture. Sadat knows this sense of latent threat firsthand: when the Taliban retook Kabul in August 2021, she herself was forced to leave the country. That experience infuses the narrative with a sharp awareness of fragility. The story moves between moments of light irony and a sadness that never turns grandiose. The balance is delicate: the director avoids solemnity and opts instead for a disarming human closeness.

At the heart of the film lies an uncomfortable question: is it possible to speak of love within a deeply corrupt patriarchal system? Naru believes there are no men capable of loving and respecting a woman in her environment. What might sound like emotional exaggeration reveals itself as a structural diagnosis. Law, custom, and religion, as they are applied, sustain an order that limits female autonomy. Even in spaces that appear modern — a TV station, a newsroom — hierarchies remain clear. The protagonist must insist on being taken seriously and faces objections that relate more to her gender than to her professional ability.

Yet No Good Men does not settle for denunciation. It also explores the possibility of a crack within the system. The relationship between Naru and Qodrat introduces ambiguity. He is older, married, and occupies a position of power. Their growing closeness is neither idyllic nor redemptive; instead, it becomes a terrain of doubt. Is he an exception that proves the rule, or an illusion that weakens the critique? Sadat avoids didactic answers, choosing instead to expose the contradiction: the desire to believe in tenderness coexists with an awareness of structural limits.

One of the film’s most distinctive features is its tone. For much of its runtime, the energy recalls a contemporary feminist comedy, with agile dialogue and situations that verge on the satirical. Naru’s friends speak frankly about sexuality and frustration; the expectation that female transgression must be swiftly punished is repeatedly undercut. That gesture is political in itself: the director refuses to reinforce the inevitability of retribution. Kabul emerges as a vivid, contradictory city where professional ambitions, private jokes, and intimate desires coexist.

But the historical context ultimately asserts itself. The announcement of the U.S. troop withdrawal and the Taliban’s advance shift the atmosphere. A sense of impending collapse permeates the final stretch. Without relying on explicit speeches, the film reveals how the personal and the political inevitably intertwine. The question of “good men” loses its abstract quality when the country as a whole slides toward a regime that institutionalizes female subordination.

In that transition, No Good Men reveals itself less as a love story than as a meditation on dignity. Everyday gestures — sharing tea, holding a camera steady, asking a question on the street — take on symbolic weight. They are not heroic acts in an epic sense, but quiet forms of resistance. Sadat frames love not as salvation but as risk: a fragile insistence on emotional truth in an environment determined to erase it.

The film, the third installment in a broader project inspired by the diaries of actor and writer Anwar Hashimi, shifts the focus here toward a decisive, outspoken female voice. If earlier works centered on a male autobiographical perspective, this story is built from the experience of a woman unafraid to make blunt judgments. That choice reshapes the narrative’s moral axis.

Sadat ultimately finds a language that is direct and deeply human. Kabul is not only a site of tragedy but also a space of everyday life. Behind political catastrophe there are always specific individuals, with doubts, contradictions, and the right to love. That simple yet radical assertion is the film’s core and explains its resonance beyond any generic label.