Afghanistan's Taliban regime is trying to crack down on a craze for the Hollywood blockbuster Titanic which has swept through Kabul in an unlikely display of resistance to the militia's hardline rule.

Cinema, television and music have been banned in the capital since the Islamic movement seized power four years ago. But underground video shops run a healthy trade in films, with action movies and Bollywood dance classics particular favourites.

Now a people whose lives have been devastated by two decades of war have fallen for a love story and Titanic fever has gripped the city.

Under the counter at market stalls traders have been doing brisk business in clothes, perfumes, lipsticks and shoes all carrying pictures of the ill-fated ship. One variety of rice has been named Titanic.

Hairdressers have been offering a Leonardo DiCaprio cut, short at the back with a floppy fringe, though all men are also required to have untrimmed beards.

"Everyone has access to films but you have to keep a low profile," said one Afghan aid worker. "People used to watch Indian movies because they could understand the language. Now they have American films, and Titanic is everywhere."

Taliban leaders have complained about this spread of foreign culture, which has even reached the cake shops of the main shopping street. "It should be emphatically said," the official Shariat Weekly newspaper declared this month, "that the Chicken Street food stores should know that moulding their wedding cakes in the shape of the Titanic ship, the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal and other designs is something against our national and Islamic culture."

Bakers should choose designs from the few traditional Afghan monuments still standing despite all the fighting, the paper suggested. Such cakes would "show the growth of our culture and prevent the sway of alien and infidel culture".

Before the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Kabul was fun. Pakistanis would drive up for the weekend to escape their more conservative society and enjoy Hindi movies and dances at the ballroom of the Intercontinental Hotel on a hillside above the city. Now the hotel is empty, its walls pocked with bullet holes, its ballroom locked, its swimming pool dry. Afghans go to Pakistan for their holidays.