"The Song of Sparrows" - Majid Majidi (2008)

With a string of contemplative, existentialist dramas about modern life, Majid Majidi has established himself as one of the foremost filmmakers anywhere. Although his films are set in contemporary Iran, and for that reason attract a certain amount of socio-political attention, the works reflect universal themes that could apply in any setting. His latest film, The Song of Sparrows (Avaze Gonjeshk-ha, 2008) continues this pattern, following on from Father (Pedar, 1996), Children of Heaven (Bacheha-ye-Aseman, 1997), The Color of Paradise” (Rang-e Khoda, 1999), Baran (2001), and The Willow Tree (Beed-e Majnoon ,2005).

In most of Majidi’s films, the protagonist, always a male, struggles through a life-changing experience that ostensibly ends in a crushing defeat. But at the conclusions of these films, the effect of the struggle has (usually) elevated the protagonist to a higher level of understanding about the world and about human relations. This is not a theoretical understanding, but something else – an intuitive sensitivity to interactive experience that goes beyond the verbal. And this is what connects Majidi’s films to Sufism and other extramundane spiritual practices.

This is not to suggest that Majidi’s characters are particularly philosophical. They are typically drawn from the working classes and have, for the most part, not had a higher education. In this connection, though, one must make note of the fact that the popular culture of Iran permeating all social levels is generally more reflective about destiny and spiritual matters than those of Western societies.

The story concerns the experiences of Karim, a middle-aged family man who lives in a village outside of Tehran, where he is initially seen working at his job on an ostrich farm. After a momentary oversight causes him to lose his job at the farm, Karim’s struggles to earn a living by other means take him to another world altogether – the hectic and confusing opportunities of the Tehran metropolis. There he finds himself faced with the conflicting moral dilemmas of modern life. Although this basic story theme has been presented countless times, the organic development of the story, with its compelling visual metaphors, has a slow, understated build-up that make it effective.

The narrative of The Song of Sparrows is filled with many little incidents and episodes, but it traces through roughly four main sections.

1. Karim at the Ostrich Farm (22 minutes).
The film opens with striking pictures of ostriches and then shows us Karim’s energetic attendance to their feeding and to collecting their huge eggs. His work is interrupted with news that Haniyeh, his teenage daughter back in the village, has lost her hearing aid in the local irrigation reservoir. He rushes back to retrieve this irreplaceably expensive item, but when recovered it turns out to be broken. Back at the ostrich ranch, Karim is momentarily distracted by the way some of his work crew are mishandling the birds, which gives one of the ostriches the opportunity to escape from its pen and head out over the barren landscape. Karim’s strenuous efforts to find the bird come to naught, and when the boss returns, Karim learns that he has been sacked. This section has served to introduce Karim and his family (a wife and three children) and its relatively modest circumstances; it ends with the disruptive event of Karim’s loss of employment. At this point three disastrous losses have occurred for Karim: the loss of his daughter’s hearing aid, the loss of the ostrich, and the loss of his job. How is the unskilled Karim going to feed his family and replace his daughter’s expensive hearing aid?

2. Karim Goes to the City (22 minutes) . Undaunted by the crisis, Karim rides his motorbike to the crowded streets of Tehran to see if the hearing aid can be repaired. After learning from a doctor that he will somehow have to buy a prohibitively expensive new one, he returns to mount his motorbike and is, just at that moment, mistakenly taken by a hurried businessman to be a private taxi operator. These private taxis are technically illegal in Iran, but they are tolerated, because this is the only practical way to move the vast urban population about the crowded streets of the city. Soon Karim realizes that he can make some money this way, and he begins pursuing this line of work in earnest. The businessmen that he subsequently picks up are all rushing about in the congested Tehran rat race, often making deals with their mobile phones as they ride on the back of his bike. Karim also discovers from overhearing the mobile phone conversations that these businessmen are often pretending to be what they are not – one of them even assures his listener insistently, “I’m in Mashhad” (another city several hundred miles east of Tehran).

Karim also observes that what is considered junk in Tehran would have some value back in his village. He picks up a tossed-out TV aerial and takes it back home to enhance his own TV reception. Soon he starts taking home other items to see if he can repair them and add to his homestead. While Karim is busy entering the hurly-burly world of capitalism, hoping to enrich himself, he learns that his son, Hussein (who is maybe 11-years-old) is similarly busy with his own dreams of enrichment. He and his boyfriends have somehow come up with the inane idea that they can become millionaires if they can grow and sell thousands of goldfish in the village water reservoir. So they are all working diligently to do what seems impossible: clean all the mud out of the reservoir so that it can be fit for their goldfish farm. To Karim this is crazy, and he scolds his son for wasting his time. At this point in the story Karim’s fortunes are on the upswing, and he is hopeful. He has decided to make his living as a motorbike taxi driver and junk repair man, and he tells his wife that he can make more money this way than by getting an ordinary unskilled worker’s job. He gives his friend, Ramezan, an offering to place at the shrine in Mashhad in the hopes that his life will continue to improve.

3. Karim’s Work in the City (25 minutes).
Having already stumbled into the job of a cycle taxi driver and junk repairman, Karim stumbles into another lucrative operation: that of a goods porter in the city. But Karim’s acquisitiveness is growing, too, and this swings the narrative arc in a downward direction. He uses a fake ID card to join a group of hired cyclists transporting refrigerators. But when his bike stalls during the mission, he loses sight of the group ahead of him and gets lost. He now succumbs to the temptation to sell his cargo refrigerator on the black market and pocket the money for himself. But the chance sighting of some ostriches on a truck somehow strikes a chord with his conscience, and he ultimately returns the refrigerator box to the original warehouse. Nevertheless Karim’s increasing obsession with commercial gain is still dominating his outlook, as is evidenced by his subsequent reluctance to pay a young girl on the road selling smoking aspand (an Iranian custom dating from Zoroastrian times to ward of the “evil eye”) anything more than the minimum amount.

Later while riding on a Tehran motorway, Karim happens to see Haniyeh and Hussein selling flowers, and he loses his temper at their actions that, from his selfish perspective, are making him lose face. In a rage, he abusively smacks poor Haniyeh, and when he returns home and learns that the flower-selling was undertaken to support Hussein’s absurd fish-farming schemes, completely blows his top. But when he storms over to the water reservoir with destructive intent, he is shocked to see that the boys have actually completed their arduous task and have cleaned up the reservoir enough for fish to live in it. Though mollified somewhat, he is still obsessed with his own junk-repair operations, which have now filled the front area of his house. While climbing over a mountain of it to arrange some of the items, he falls and breaks his leg.

4. A Change of Heart. (26 minutes).
With Karim now disabled, he can only watch passively while his wife and children earnestly set about making ends meet by working as farm labourers. After the dog-eat-dog world of competitive commerce in Tehran, his eyes are newly opened to the cooperative and communal style of life in his village. He is touched and starts to see things differently. On a trip to the doctor in Tehran, he is accompanied by the village boys seeking to buy goldfish for their foolish fish-farm scheme. When the boys lose all their fish in an accident and are devastated, Karim smiles benignly at their tragedy and sees the beauty of life in a larger context. At the end of the film he sees a sparrow trapped in his room, and he opens the door to set it free. When his friend Ramezan reports that the wayward ostrich from the ostrich farm has returned, Karim reflects on how he has changed since that original loss, and he lapses into a dream or meditation in which the ostriches appear as splendiferous creatures of God.

There are several significant symbolic themes in the The Song of Sparrows. Ostriches have long been images of iconic importance in Eastern Africa and the Middle East, going back to ancient Egyptian times [1]. Their enormous size as the largest birds and their fierce appearance have undoubtedly been the inspiration of mythical images of winged monsters and deities. The huge size of ostrich eggs connotes the power of renewal and rebirth at springtime and has its own iconic significance. Throughout the film, when Karim sees ostriches or their eggs, he seems to be reminded of something transcendent beyond his own immediate circumstances. These moments of reflection occasioned by ostrich sightings occur in all four acts, notably when he is spurred to return the refrigerator to the warehouse in Act 3. In all these cases, the ostrich seems to suggest the fearful and stirring power of life, but also the power of death.

Sparrows, by contrast, are at the opposite end of the bird spectrum – small and assumed to be individually insignificant. But sparrows also reflect the ever-teeming wonder and vitality of nature. After the village boys have cleaned out the water reservoir, some sparrows have come to nest there. When Karim releases the sparrow from his room at the end, it reflects his renewed sensitivity to the small, daily rhythms of life. If ostriches suggest individuality, sparrows suggest community.

Another symbolic reference is associated with Karim’s observation of his son’s and companions’ foolish obsession with making a fortune from a goldfish farm. This is a symbolic microcosm of God looking down at his (and our) own foibles. Karim’s mad quest to make money and forget about the important things of life was, from the celestial perspective, just as trivial as the boys’ schemes. After his accident in the last part of the film, Karim begins to view the boys’ activities with a benign tolerance. He sees their narrow-minded struggles to become “millionaires” with a loving and caring benevolence, just as we might hope God might see our own error-filled ways.

Majid Majidi is sometimes classed with his countrymen, Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi as a neorealist filmmaker. Although they all tend to concentrate focalization on a single main character, there are significant differences in terms of their respective visual narrative styles. Kiarostami tends to have long and static camera takes, that keep the viewer relatively uninvolved with the action. Even when Kiarostami’s camera is relatively in close, it seems to occupy an emotionally neutral position. Thus his mise-en-scene has an overall distancing effect on the viewer. Majidi, in contrast, features a fluid, dynamic visual style that keeps the viewer involved as if it were an unseen participant in the action. His style entails carefully crafted action cuts and well-motivated point-of-view shots throughout – a remarkable achievement in view of the natural, often urban, settings and the use of a mostly unprofessional cast. Panahi occupies something of a middle position between Kiarostami and Majidi, with relatively long camera takes, but very adroitly performed camera movements that maintain more of a narrative involvement and are ultimately less-distancing than Kiarostami’s cinematography. As a consequence of Majidi’s well-motivated cinematography and fluid editing, the viewer of his films has a much greater emotional involvement with the narrative flow. In addition, while Kiarostami’s principal characters are frequently somewhat cut off from (and hence more reflective about) their social contexts, Majidi’s characters are more immersed in their social environments. But even with this contextual immersion in Majidi’s films, there are always moments when the principal character has an epiphany, a flash of awareness, and this experience is intuitively shared by the viewer. Incidentally, this is the first Majidi film (in my recollection) that does not end with a shot overlooking water.

Although Majidi occasionally employs actors with professional experience, only the lead actor in The Song of Sparrows had professional acting experience, and that was Mohammad Amir Naji (aka Reza Naji), who was an earlier non-professional discovery of Majidi’s and had appeared in Children of Heaven (Bacheha-ye-Aseman, 1997), Baran (2001), and The Willow Tree (Beed-e Majnoon, 2005). In all of those earlier performances, Naji, although only a supporting actor, was a magnetic and compelling presence who added crucial energy to the narrative. In The Song of Sparrows, Naji is thrust to centre stage, as Karim, and he occupies an extraordinary amount of screen time. For his efforts on this occasion, Naji won the “Silver Bear” at the Berlin Film Festival, and “Best Performance by an Actor” at the 2008 Asia Pacific Screen Awards. Despite this recognition and my great appreciation for his earlier performances, I found Naji’s performance in The Song of Sparrows to represent the one serious weakness of the film.

Naji’s performance here is so over-the-top and strained that it borders on music hall theatrics. There is too much grimacing and melodramatic posturing, and it runs against the naturalistic setting that has been painstakingly established with the film and its other performers. In addition Naji’s face has been cosmetically altered with a considerably elongated nose, a different jaw line, and a strange set of teeth. This gives him an almost clownish appearance and suggests that some of the scenes are played for laughs. Although such effects can lighten the tone, they also keep the viewer from sympathising with Karim’s situation and moral struggles. The net effect is that Naji’s performance plays against the strengths of Majidi’s film and diminishes its effectiveness, thereby keeping the film from reaching the level of Majidi’s best work.

In The Song of Sparrows the otherworldly references in the film are enhanced by the occasional and nonintrusive background music of Hossein Alizadeh, a preeminent Iranian tar musician and composer of music for classical instruments. This gives a melancholic feeling to the story, and at the end, a sense of calm and resignation at the infinite complexity of existence. Does this suggest passivity and fatalism, that one should always be resigned to one’s humble circumstances? Let us hope not. One can’t help but admire the never-say-die fortitude and belief-in-himself of Karim, as he is viewed in the earlier stages of the film. Although something of a rube from the countryside, Karim is industrious and energetic, always looking for new opportunities. What we should take from this story is not a recommendation for passivity, but the conviction that Karim's indomitable energy can only be enriched by a broader appreciation of the cooperative harmony of nature and humanity. Overall, though, The Song of Sparrows is another impressive installment in Majidi’s continuing existential exploration of the higher and more spiritual levels of human experience.
★★★

Notes:

1. “Ostrich Eggs and Peacock Feathers: Sacred Objects as Cultural Exchange between Christianity and Islam”, by Nile Green, Al-Masaq, Volume 18, Issue 1 March 2006, pp. 27 - 66.

“The Willow Tree” - Majid Majidi (2005)

Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi, one of the greatest directors working today, has always presented narratives imbued with the themes of Sufism and focused on the deepest personal and spiritual connections in the lives of his characters. His The Willow Tree (Beed-e Majnoon, 2005) continues with these considerations, and in some ways it is his most explicitly philosophical work to date. Like his superb immediately preceding fiction films, Father (Pedar, 1996), Children of Heaven (Bacheha-Ye Aseman, 1997), The Color of Paradise (Rang-e Khoda, 1999), and Baran (2001), there is a focus on an individual who undergoes an anguish-filled, life-changing experience. At the close of all of those films, which always contain a contemplative shot over water, the main character has failed to achieve his personal goals, but we can see (even if the character, himself, is only dimly aware) that he has emerged as a more complete human being. This narrative arc is more or less parallelled in The Willow Tree, but perhaps not quite.

The story is relatively straightforward. Youssef, played by noted Iranian actor Parviz Parastui, is a middle-aged literature professor in Tehran who has been blind since the age of eight and who now lives relatively comfortably with his devoted wife and young daughter. At the beginning of the film, he is suffering from a worsened medical condition that he learns has become life-threatening. He prays to God to let him live, reminding God that he has already put up with his diminished life due to blindness for thirty-eight years. “If I come out of this darkness, I’d be with You forever,” he says in his mind to God. His family then send him to Paris for an operation on the tumour behind his eye in the hopes that it is not malignant. Unexpectedly, the tumour turns out to be benign, and the doctors are able to perform a cornea transplant that restores his sight. At the one-third mark of the film, he returns to Tehran a new man and open to the world of sight. But he does not experience the joy that he expected, and he is troubled by doubts about what he now really wants out of life. Before, his goal was simple, to see, but now things are more complicated. He sees himself now as old and sidelined: a victim who has missed out on the chances to have a full life. He is distracted by the complexity of the newly-discovered visual world, including the hypnotic allure of attractive women. Previously, when blind, he was always looked after by the people around hm, but now he sees himself as only having been a passive ward of others. Assertive action is now required of him, but he is paralysed and frustrated. His wife, feeling neglected, leaves him, and he miserably burns all his past writings, feeling that they represented his past, wasted life. But just as he at his most self-pitying, he loses his sight again and is returned to the world of darkness. The film ends with his sorrowful contemplation of his earlier plea to God to give him a second chance.

On the surface, this story sounds like a simple moral tale, and this is how it has been interpreted by most critics. A man makes a bargain God, wishing for something and promising to change his life. The man fails to live up to his end of the bargain, so the granted wish is taken away at the end. But are we to assume that a filmmaker such as Majidi, so inspired by Sufi mysticism, would be simply cautioning his viewers by invoking the crude economics of moral bookkeeping? Surely there must be more to this story than that.

First, we must bear in mind that Youssef, himself, is a professor specialising in Iranian Sufi poetry. The issues of love, freedom, and the spirit would not be unknown to him. Early in the film, he has written that

“Rumi with his tact and sharp mind gave all he had to Shams-e-Tabrizi and told him to burn it. Was Shams getting something in return? As for Rumi, he always bet on love and expected nothing in return.”

It is perhaps reflecting on this act of Rumi's that he later burns his own books and writings. Even when Youssef returns from Paris with his sight restored and is distracted by his uncle’s vivacious sister-in-law, Pari, there is still a connection with his interests in Sufi poetry. Pari has given him her student thesis on Sufi poetry to review, and later he appears to be reading and highlighting this thesis (the book he is reading at this time has the same red binding as the thesis that Pari had earlier handed to Youssef’s wife, Roya). He is inspired by a commingling of both her comments about Sufi poetry and her exuberant womanliness.

He is presumably aware of the relative insignificance of the world of words and abstract ideas, when they are compared with the vital reality of embodied existence. Yet, as a blind man, that world of words had been his primary option and had come to dominate his existence. As a successful academic, the life of words was a natural focus, and he had not wholly engaged in the fullness of life. So I would contend that his earlier domestic life of blindness was not necessarily a paradise lost, but had been instead a passive world of minimal engagement. A key shot in the film is when Youssef first experiences the wonders of the visual world in the hospital. He looks down at a window blind and sees an ant carrying a grain of food across the blind. This reveals a world, not simply of objects and shapes, but one that is alive, even down to the smallest things. It is a mysterious, vital world that is animated with a life force, perhaps the all-pervasive God. The shot of the ant may also be a reference to a passage from Rumi’s great work, Masnavi:

The spirit is like an ant, and the body like a grain of wheat
which the ant carries to and fro continually.
The ant knows that the grains of which it has taken charge
will change and become assimilated.
One ant picks up a grain of barley on the road;
another ant picks up a grain of wheat and runs away.
The barley doesn't hurry to the wheat,
but the ant comes to the ant, yes it does.
The going of the barley to the wheat is merely consequential:
it's the ant that returns to its own kind.
Don't say, "Why did the wheat go to the barley?"
Fix your eye on the holder, not on that which is held.
As when a black ant moves along on a black felt cloth:
the ant is hidden from view; only the grain is visible on its way.
But Reason says: "Look well to your eye:
when does a grain ever move along without a carrier?"
-- (Masnavi VI: 2955-2962)

Here, the ant represents the vital spirit that animates all of reality, and it is that aspect to which we must direct our awareness, not just to the cold, lifeless objects in the world. It is the spirits (the ants) that collectively make the world move, that animate it, and we should focus our consciousness on that level of reality. But it seems that Youssef has “lost sight” of this image. At the very end of the film, when Youssef is contemplating his earlier written plea to God to give him another chance, we again see an ant carrying a grain of food as it walks across the page. From our perspective we know that it is carrying not only the grain of food but the Sufi message that Youssef had forgotten.

Related to this is Youssef’s existential inability to take action in his newly animated world. This can be connected with his previous forced (because he was blind) existence that was almost exclusively in the realm of the narratives of others (including his family members), as opposed to his own autonomous life constructed from direct experience. French director Robert Bresson has remarked that he hates drama and the theatre, because they always represent someone’s already existing “story”. All the events in a drama, according to Bresson, are connected to identified causes – causes that have been identified and ascribed by the storyteller. But when we, ourselves, experience the world in its existential flow, there are no immediately perceived causes for events – those causes are only attributed later by us, upon reflection. At the time we experience the immediate events, there are no causes tied to them. Bresson insisted that, in contrast with typical dramas, he wanted to craft films such that the viewer did not have any prepackaged causes tied to the events that are depicted (hence his aversion to any theatrical “performances” on the part of his actors that would be motivated by their own prepackaged narratives). Bresson wanted the viewer of his films to bear a much greater burden in constructing the story in his own head as he watches the film – an activity that would simulate our experience of everyday life as we live it. From this perspective, we can see that Youssef is a person who has always lived with existing narratives and their prepackaged narrative causes. When he is out there in the world of direct visual experiences, he is unable to construct his own narratives that afford suitable action. So he is frozen in his tracks.

From this angle, we can understand what happens when Youssef visits a jewelry factory, where they are making artifacts with melted gold. Perhaps contemplating the contrast between this concrete world of rivulets of melted gold and more abstract thoughts of Rumi’s visit to the goldsmith, Salah ud-Din-e Zarkub, he is startled out of his reverie by an accidental shower of sparks from the furnace that spray onto him. This world of gold-crafting is alive and dangerous! Later, he watches a pickpocket at work on the subway and remains paralysed in inaction while the theft is carried out. Moreover, he feels an emotional desire for the girl Pari, but is unable to take any decisive action on that front, as well. In all these cases, he demonstrates his inability to act – he sees, but is confused by both all the options and his personal responsibilities. He is still disengaged from life, and he knows it. This is what drives him mad. Note that the Farsi title of the film, “Beed-e Majnoon”, carries with it an additional colloquial suggestion of madness, in reference to the Iranian legend of Leila and Majnoon, in which Majnoon goes mad with love for Leila.

On the technical production side, it is worth nothing that although the film is beautifully crafted and photographed, the Iranian prohibition concerning the presentation of adult Iranian women is severely restrictive. Women must be shown wearing the hejab at all times, even inside their own homes, which is unnatural. Not only are men and women forbidden to kiss, of course, they cannot even touch in any way. This is a problem that Iranian filmmakers try to overcome in creative ways, but it is clearly problematic, for example in the case when Youssf is joyfully greeted by his wife and family upon his return from Paris. In addition, there are elements in the film that I find somewhat open-ended and make me wonder.

• The flashback scene where Roya recollects an episode in Youssef’s classroom in which he had dropped his ring on the floor, is unclear. What is it's significance? The fact that almost all the action in the film is seen from Youssef’s perspective, make this scene from Roya’s point of view stand out. But what is this scene’s import?
• Later in the film when Youssef is wandering around in the night, lost in his confused and frustrated thoughts, he is shown walking down a dark lane. In the middle of this shot, there is a dissolve to Youssef, seen from the same perspective but much further away from the camera. Why such an odd transition? There doesn't seem to be any motivation for this or progression suggested by the shot.
• At the end of the film, the blind-once-again Youssef, having awakened and found himself delivered back to the pool in his own garden, desperately searches for his earlier, Braille-written plea to God for another chance. Though sightless, he knows it’s in the bottom of the pool somewhere, and he finds it and reads it again. Although this is a dramatic reminder to the audience of his earlier promise to God, it’s motivation within the action here is not clear. He presumably knows what’s printed on the paper, or he wouldn’t be searching for it. Why, if he knows what's written on it, does he want that paper so much?
• And what is the role of his friend, Morteza, whom he meets at the hospital in Paris? There are suggestions that Morteza (played with characteristic panache by Mohammad Amir Naji, who had performed admirably in Children of Heaven and Baran) is a messenger from God: his two appearances are connected with critical changes in Youssef’s situation, and he appears to have unworldly knowledge of Youssef’s circumstances. He writes Youssef a letter, in which he says:

  “Tell me what’s worth seeing, and I will tell you what’s not worth seeing. Ever since I have practiced not seeing, I have seen many wonderful things.”

  What is Morteza's intent? In any case, one wonders if perhaps the charismatic Morteza’s presence in the film should have been more emphasized.

In the end, we must consider the possibility that Youssef's sight is restored again at the end of the film by a compassionate God. After all, there is the familiar image of the ant walking across the paper, which was connected with his earlier gift of sight. However, I don’t think Youssef’s sight is restored at the end of the film, and if it were really Majidi's intention to portray that, I believe that it would weaken the power of the drama.

In addition there is the question as to whether Youssef is now a more enlightened person at the end of this story. I believe that he is not, and this means it would be a departure from the earlier Majidi films in which the protagonist always emerges from his ordeal as a better person. In their closing shots over water, those other Majidi films evoke an epiphany about the richness of human existence. In each case something in the material world has been lost, but something higher, in the world of the soul, has been gained. But in The Willow Tree that epiphany, for me, was not present. Youssef is simply suffering, and he has been returned to darkness. He may have seen the "light", but it is not clear. His brief opportunity to see just how rich and complex is the world of human interaction has led him to despise even more the sightless life to which he is now returned. He has still not learned how to reach out to others and to take action.
★★★½ 

"Baran" - Majid Majidi (2001)

Majid Majidi’s fifth feature film, Baran (2001), shares some key characteristics with his previous outings, Father (1996), Children of Heaven (1997), and The Color of Paradise (1999). In all of them, a boy is trying to come to terms with the world, the story ends more or less disastrously on the physical plane, but there is an epiphany on a higher plane. Hoever, there is a uniquely new element to Baran: this is a story about romantic love. Making a story about love between a man and a woman is undoubtedly challenging in present-day Iran, but we should remember that this society has an enormous cultural store and sensitivity to human love. Much of our Western notions about romantic love derive from these sources.

The story is set mostly at a Tehran building construction site, the type whose construction methods and materials, using mainly bricks, cinder blocks, and plaster, offer a major opportunity for unskilled and semi-skilled employment. In a country with a usually high unemployment rate, the competition for unskilled construction jobs naturally leads to low pay scales. Complicating the situation in Iran since 1979 has been the influx of Afghan refugees following the disruptions due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the ensuing brutal civil war. By the year 2000, Iran was hosting 1.5 million desperately poor Afghans, many of whom had spent their entire lives in specially designated refugee camps. Note that to work legally in Iran, to buy things in stores, and just to get around generally, you need a shenasname, the Iranian identity card. Of course, these Afghan refugees didn’t have them and couldn’t easily find work. But construction contractors would hire the refugees, anyway, for even lower wages, which would save the contractors money, as long as they weren’t caught and fined by government inspectors. This was the situation at the building site in Baran: it had a number of Afghans there, working harder than the others and for substandard pay.

At the outset we see Lateef, an Iranian boy in his late teens, who is working at the construction site. It’s immediately clear that Lateef has an attitude problem and is something of a punk – the kind of kid who elsewhere might be a skateboard-riding troublemaker on view in your locale. Thanks to his father’s friendship with construction site manager, Memar, Lateef has the relatively soft job of providing tea and chow at the work breaks, and this gives him the chance to walk around the site during his serving periods, making wisecracks and playing the big shot. While others are working hard, he taunts them from his special perch and continues to stir up trouble. In his idle moments he likes to throw stones at pigeons.

One day one of the Afghans, Najaf, breaks his foot in a fall and has to be taken to the hospital. The following day his friend and fellow Afghan, Soltan, brings Najaf’s son, Rahmat, to the manager, hoping to find a job for him in Najaf’s absence. He explains that Najaf has a number of small children and no other means of support. Memar, who is tough but concerned for his workers, is skeptical when he looks at Rahmat’s slight build, but reluctantly gives his consent. Soon it is clear that Rahmat is not strong enough for the heavy work, and Memar decides to solve two problems at once. He assigns the food preparation job to Rahmat and orders the perpetual nuisance, Lateef, to start doing regular construction work.

Stung by his demotion, Lateef tries to make life miserable for Rahmat (he even smacks him in the face), but Rahmat suffers the malicious pranks stoically. However, one day Lateef makes an eye-popping discovery when he sees someone secretly combing long hair: Rahmat is actually a girl masquerading as boy! It turns out that the only one of Najaf’s children old enough to work is his daughter (whose name, we later learn, is "Baran", meaning “rain” in Farsi). Soon Lateef has entirely new and protective feelings for his vulnerable co-worker. But her precarious circumstances, Iranian (and Afghan) social restrictions, and Lateef's previous vengeance-driven mistreatment of her all stand in the way of any possible friendly approaches. All he can do is keep an eye out and come to her aid when he feels that she is threatened. Not long afterwards, though, the building inspectors discover the presence of the Afghans at the site, and they all get booted out. Lateef now doesn’t even know where the girl has gone, but his interest and desires to help are enflamed. He takes unpaid time off from work to find out where she is and to carry out successive self-sacrificing acts to help her.

1. He manages to take out his accumulated year’s earnings from Memar and gives them to Soltan to give to Najaf. However, Soltan has his own desperate problems back in Afghanistan and disappears with all the money across the border.
2. Using the rest of his money that he had been secretly squirrelling away, he buys crutches for Najaf. When he goes to deliver them to Najaf’s hut, he overhears from behind the door a grief-laden family conversation revealing that Najaf’s brother has just died in the Afghan civil war, leaving his brother’s family homeless. So Lateef leaves the crutches by the door and disappears before anyone sees him.
3. With no further resources, he sells his shenasname in the black market and gives the money to Najaf, saying that it comes from Memar. He knows that Iranian custom would prevent Najaf from accepting a gift straight from his own hand.

Baran never learns of Lateef's role in any of these noble gestures.

The next day Lateef comes to help Najaf’s familly load their belongings onto a truck headed back to Afghanistan. When Baran happens to drop a basket of vegetables, he rushes to help her pick them up. As if knowing that this may be their only moment of interaction, their hands move slowly, carefully, almost touching. When finished, they exchange a momentary glance. Just that. But in this society where, in some quarters, unrelated men and women are not even expected to look each other in the eye, this is a shared moment. Baran covers her face with her burqa and walks towards the truck. When her shoe gets stuck in the mud, Lateef rushes to help her. But, again, there is no touching. The truck departs, and Lateef knows that he will never see her again. But he stares, smiling wistfully, at her last footprint in the mud, as the rain falls.

Lateef has lost all his savings and his indispensable identity card. The woman he loves has disappeared into Afghanistan and is lost forever. But he has gained something, too -- something invaluable. He is a new man and now sees the whole world differently. It is a world that was invisible to him before. And he will never look at the rainfall again in the same way.

This is a film of longing, of unfulfilled desire, and it plays without missing a beat or a note. It is very much in the tradition of Wong Kar Wai’s films, which are situated in a vastly different culture, but reflect similar, universal feelings of our highest sentiments. And like Wong Kar Wai’s films, too, there are whimsical and ironic moments that sometimes bring a smile. What sets Baran apart, however, is the exquisite artistry and subtlety of the presentation. The acting performances are uniformly good. Hossein Abedini, as Lateef, (he also had a major role in Majidi's earlier work, Father) manages the difficult journey from selfish adolescent to compassionate human being with just the right amount of exuberance. Mohammad Amir Naji, as the harried but sympathetic Memar, enlivens the proceedings with his energy and manages to embody the human soul of the construction working environment.

The cinematography and mise en scene are also outstanding. I recall from my graduate film school days when a noted professor remarked that the truly great filmmakers, like Fellini, make films that can be understood purely on visual terms. You can understand them with the sound turned off. So it is with Majidi’s Baran, a visual tour de force. Lateef and Rahmat/Baran are almost never shown in the same shot, yet we are always kept aware and involved of their relative positions and points of view -- and always in a very natural, flowing manner. Majidi uses the various sites, particularly the building site, in atmospheric and evocative fashion. One notable example is the 97-second crane shot depicting the first appearance of Soltan and Rahmat at the construction site. As it follows them continuously up three levels of the building to where they can talk to Memar, we unobtrusively get an overall feeling for the layout and activities of the work site.

At one point in the film, Lateef meets and engages an itinerant Afghan shoe repair man, who poetically offers this rumination:

From the hot fire of being apart
Comes the flame that burns the heart.

Iran is a country where poetic meditations on life's mysteries permeate all levels and areas of society. And Majidi is its cinematic Hafez.
★★★★

Majid Majidi

About Majid Majidi:

• Majidi's upcoming film about Muhammad and his loyalty to Khamanei divide the Iranian film community  – see "Rare Portrayal of Muhammad’s Youth in Upcoming Iranian Film" (Guardian). 

Films of Majid Majidi:

• Father (Pedar) - Majid Majidi (1996)
• Children of Heaven (Bacheha-ye-Aseman) - Majid Majidi (1997)
• The Color of Paradise (Rang-e Khoda) - Majid Majidi (1999)
• Baran - Majid Majidi (2001)
• The Willow Tree (Beed-e Majnoon) - Majid Majidi (2005)
• The Song of Sparrows (Avaze Gonjeshk-ha, 2008)

"The Color of Paradise" - Majid Majidi (1999)

The Color of Paradise (Rang-e Khoda, literally "Color of God”), Majid Majidi’s fourth feature film, was released in 1999, directly following his Oscar-nominated Children of Heaven. In this film Majidi again demonstrates his ability to express in cinematic terms some of the deep stirrings we have about life. As with his two immediately preceding films, Father and Children of Heaven, the relationship between a young boy and his father plays a significant role in the narrative. In The Color of Paradise, however, Majidi goes even further beyond the immediacy of our ordinary circumstances and turns our eyes toward the transcendent. Of course we cannot see the transcendent with our eyes, and this is metaphorically reflected in the plight of the blind boy in the film.

The story concerns an eight-year-old boy who is blind and lives in a remote village with his widowed father, his two sisters, and his grandmother. Somewhat like Father, there are two equally significant protagonists in the story, the boy and his father. Some commentators have suggested that the father is an antagonist, not a protagonist, but I disagree – we follow their two separate journeys with equal concern. The father’s circumstances, that of a poor, semi-skilled labourer saddled with the care of three young children, are easier for us to fathom, so much of the early part of the film goes into showing us the world of Mohammed, the young boy.

The film opens with slow disclosure: a black screen and the sounds of children identifying tapes that are being played in a cassette recorder. When visuals appear, we find ourselves watching the last day of class before the summer break at a school for the blind in Tehran. Soon all the children are picked up into the loving arms of their parents, except one boy, Mohammed, whose father is late in coming. While he waits outside, we are gradually shown the world as it is to Mohammad, one restricted to sounds and tentative touching with the hands. At one point, Mohammad’s ears prick up; he has heard something. Carefully, he makes his way over to the foot of a nearby tree and searches around in the dried fallen leaves for something. It turns out to be a fledgling bird that has fallen from a nest. With great care and determination, the boy manages to pick up the fledgling, then climb up the tree, and locate the nest to which he can restore the little bird. It’s a skilfully edited sequence and reveals something about the way Mohammad relates to the world around him.

When the father, Hashem, arrives, he tells the school officials that he is too poor to take care of a blind boy and asks if he can be kept at the school. The school officials inform him that this is not possible, and it is clear that this is going to be a key issue for much of the film. Then the father takes his son back to his village situated in the lush, green Caspian area of Iran. Since much of Iran has a stark, arid landscape, the Caspian area, with its groves and wildflowers, has a special attraction for many Iranians. So an Iranian viewer would likely be even more mindful of Mohammad’s inability to see and enjoy the richly colourful landscapes shown throughout the film. Nevertheless, Mohammad’s intimate encounter with the natural world of his village, assisted by the close relationships he has with his two sisters and grandmother, is full of joy and wonder. He wants to learn the language of nature, just as he has had adeptly learned braille at his school, so that he can go on and participate in all the dialogues of nature’s creatures.

The father, meanwhile, is struggling to fashion a satisfactory life for himself in the adult world of affairs. Widowed for the past five years and with a young family to support, he hopes to find the companionship of another wife – not so easy when you are neither young nor rich and are living in the socially-restricted circumstances of rural Iran. Having a handicapped boy to raise is a further burden that causes him to curse his bad fortune. He has his heart set on a young woman nearby whose fiancé has recently died, and she appears to be receptive to his interest. Nevertheless, he has to get the approval of her extended family (which in Iran requires a dowry from the groom) and fears that his handicapped son will impede his chances. Mohammad’s grandmother, Aziz, observes this situation with concern. She loves little Mohammad and quietly scolds her son for placing his own personal desires above that of his family.

The father, though, is not a bad person, and we can feel for him, too. For him, life is a constant struggle, and he sees himself as a victim in a hostile world. At times when he travels alone, he apprehensively hears the noise of some wild animals, perhaps wolves, barking in the distance. The indistinct, threatening nature of this noise represent the unknown, the “evil eye”, which is lurking in the darkness, just around the corner. Worried about his son’s future, and his own, the father decides to see if he can apprentice the boy to a blind carpenter in a neighbouring village. He reasons that the carpenter can tutor the boy so that he can be able to earn a living.

Meanwhile, Mohammad, an avid student at the school for the blind, learns that the village school that his sisters attend hasn’t yet started its holiday break and begs them to let him go to the school with them. Eventually, this is allowed, and he is given a seat in the class. Fortunately, his braile lessons from the school for the blind match those of the village classroom, and Mohammad turns out to be the star pupil. He comes home thrilled to announce that he received a perfect score at school. This news, however, only irritates Mohammad’s father, since he still believes that the boy has no future in the village. Against the boy’s will, he forcibly takes him to the blind carpenter and leaves him there to be tutored.

The carpenter soon discovers that the boy is crying and asks why. The boy says that nobody loves him, not even God, and pours out his grief:

“Our teacher says that God loves the blind more, because they cannot see. But I told him if it was so, He would not make us blind so that we cannot see him. He answered, ‘God is not visible. He is everywhere. You can feel Him. You can see Him through your fingertips.’ Now I reach out everywhere for God till the day my hands touch Him.”

Back at the home, Grandma Aziz is distraught at Mohammad’s banishment and decides to leave the house, even though there is a heavy rainstorm. Hashem begs her to say, saying he took the boy away for his own good. He pleads his own case:

“What have I done wrong to be stuck with taking care of a blind child for the rest of my life. Who will look after me when I am old and weak. Why doesn’t the great god of your help me out of this misery. Why should I be grateful to Him? For the things I don’t have? For my miseries? For a blind child? For the wife I have lost?"

Aziz has no answer, only her simple way of being in the world, which is evidenced by her stooping, even in the midst of her distress, to help a stranded fish get back into the stream. Hashem eventually gets her back home, but she is now ill from a chill and soon dies. At the moment of her death, we are given to believe by her countenance and by a change in lighting that she sees and joins God.

Hashem receives yet another crushing setback. The family of the girl he wishes to marry has decided to cancel the upcoming marriage because of “bad omens”. So he goes to the carpenter and decides to bring Mohammad back home with him. While crossing a rickey bridge on the way home, the bridge collapses, and Mohammad falls into the swift stream and is rapidly swept down river. Hashem runs to help and jumps into the stream, but the swirling waters are too rough for him to do anything but try to say afloat. He is eventually deposited, unconscious, on the more calm banks of the river mouth into the Caspian. When he regains consciousness, he looks about him and sees the figure of Mohammad some distance away, lying on the shore.

Rushing over, he discovers that the boy is dead, and he weeps uncontrollably, with the boy in his arms. A flock of wild birds flies overhead, as the mystery of life for others goes on. In the final shot, the camera moves in from above to a close-up of Mohammad’s hand, showing the fingertips illuminated in the same eerie light shown at Aziz’s death, and moving slightly. Mohammad, too, has now joined God and is finally “seeing” Him with his fingers.

This is a religious film, but not one with the conventional religious answers. None of the living people in the film gains enlightenment – in this world, anyway. Hashem, perhaps, now realises the treasure he has lost. The only thing that we all have in this world is our participation in the joy of life, whatever our circumstances. Both Mohammad and Aziz were the ones who naively engaged the world in this way, and perhaps they were the ones who gained the most, even in this earthly world. Mohammad had spent his time trying to “read” the stones on the beach, as if they were coded in braile. When we reflect on the hopeless absurdity of his effort, we are reminded that we, ourselves, are equally blind in our own attempts to read meaning in the world by means of our tools and power of analysis.

Much of what makes The Color of Paradise effective as a film are the pastoral scenes of Mohammad trying to discover the wonders of the world around him. These are contrasted with Hashem’s struggles as a builder, carrying out routine, repetitive, and strenuous tasks that have been set up in the more restricted world of economic society and that he must complete in order to earn his keep. The cinematography throughout the film is superb, and the filming of the collapsing bridge scene is particularly remarkable. The acting in the film is remarkable, too, since only the role of Hashem was filled by a professional actor, Hossein Mahjoub. (In fact Mahjoub’s performance may have been a bit too theatrical for the overall tenor of the film, but perhaps that theatricality was necessary.)

In several ways, The Color of Paradise is reminiscent of Fellini’s La Strada, including the final shot. The main figure in both films is a man who comes to a moment of suffering at the end of the film, when he has lost something precious. What makes both films great is the stress on this moment of suffering, itself. This moment is different from just learning a lesson, such as “oh, I should have acted differently, but now it’s too late.” It is that moment of suffering that brings us to another level of sensitivity about the world of life around us. This, essentially Sufi, revelation is something that is even more deliriously realized in Majidi’s next film, Baran.
★★★★

"Children of Heaven" - Majid Majidi (1997)

Children of Heaven (Bacheha-ye-Aseman), Majid Majidi’s exquisite third film, was released in 1997, right after his second film, Father (Pedar), and it became the first Iranian film to be nominated for an Oscar. Shot on a budget of about US$ 180,000, the film subsequently grossed about a US$ 1 million and propelled both Majidi and Iranian cinema in general to much greater international attention. Since the narrative of this film, like a number of other Iranian films, such as Where Is My Friend’s Home? and The White Balloon, is centred around children, it has frequently been compared by critics to those other films (see the commentary about children-centred themes in Iranian films in my review of Jafar Panahi’s The Mirror). But since Children of Heaven is quite distinct from those other Iranian films and stands head-and-shoulders above them, it is worth reflecting on the particular merits of this film and how they were achieved.

The story concerns a 9-year-old boy, Ali, and his 7-year-old sister, Zahra, who live with their parents in a meagre one-room flat in south Tehran. At the outset, Ali has been sent to have his sister’s shoes repaired, but on the way home the repaired shoes are mistakenly taken away by a city ragpicker while Ali is dutifully shopping for some potatoes that his mother needs. This establishes the “problem” that drives the rest of the action. Ali is mortified by having lost the shoes, knowing that his family cannot afford to replace them and that he will be severely punished for his error. He and his sister take the only option that appears: since they attend school at different times, they must share Ali’s sneakers, without telling their parents. In the morning Zahra will wear the sneakers to school and then rush to pass them to Ali for his afternoon school. But this is not easy. Zahra must duck out of school early each day to give the sneakers to Ali, who then must sprint to his own school, where he inevitably arrives after the bell. This is not a sustainable arrangement, and we know that something will have to give.

There are other episodes that crop up and play into this narrative. Zahra spies from a distance another schoolmate who is now wearing her lost shoes. Now she has to figure out how to get them back, but her plans are ultimately abandoned when she learns that the father of the new shoe owner is blind and in even worse economic circumstances than her own family. So the basic problem is still not solved. Ali, for his part, accompanies his father to the wealthy neighbourhoods up the elevated slopes of north Tehran, where his father hopes to land some gardening work. Thanks to a bit of luck and Ali’s pluck, they do finally land a gardening job, and it appears that some extra income might actually enable new shoes to be purchased. But, again, hopes are quashed by misfortune. The father, riding the bike with Ali aboard on the way home, loses control on the steep downward-sloping streets towards south Tehran, crashes the bike, and suffers some minor but debilitating injuries.

Finally, another opportunity arises. There will be city-wide cross-country (4-kilometre) race for 9 and 10-year-olds, and the third place finisher is to be awarded a pair of new sneakers. Ali tells Zahra that he will somehow finish in third place and then give her the awarded sneakers. This leads to a highly dramatic climax, as Ali barely manages to qualify for the race and, as the race ensues, work his way towards the front of the pack. Can he reach the front, and, even more problematically, can he finish in third place? At the finish line, there is a wild lunge by several boys at the front, including Ali, to cross it, and Ali ultimately learns from the smiling, excited school officials that he has finished first! He has won a prize, but not the right prise, and, alas, the new sneakers remain out of reach. The end of the film shows Ali taking off his now completely worn out and ruined sneakers and disconsolately soaking his blistered feet in the housing compound goldfish pond. Now, finally, he and his sister don’t even have one pair of shoes, and ruin awaits them.

Comparing this film and its story to those other contemporary Iranian child-films, there are some striking differences. Children of Heaven has a much more structured and dramatic plot, with a heart-thumping finish, whereas the other films, though they have an initial “problem” to be solved and a quest, have an almost aimless set of events that wander in and out of the action at a slow pace. In addition, the cinematography and editorial pacing of Children of Heaven takes advantage of the full range of cinematic story-telling techniques, with tracking shots, pans, a wide range of camera framings, camera reversals, and point-of-view shots – very much in contrast to the minimalist and static, fixed-camera settings of Kiarostami and, to a certain extent, Panahi. It is remarkable how cinematic the film is, given what must be considerably demanding circumstances for shooting films in Iran. In a 1999 interview Majidi described though an interpreter (interestingly, Majidi, at least as of 1999, does not speak English) some of the conditions set for making a film in Iran:

“The government has a monopoly on film stock and equipment. So every filmmaker has to go to them to rent these items. The government issues screening permits for the films, which means they can ban a film or demand changes in it. They also rate them on artistic and cultural merits. They reward A-grade films with rights to advertise on the government controlled media and screenings at the best theaters. While C-grade filmmakers can be kept from making films for a year.”

In an effort to get more real-life performances, Majidi also employed hidden cameras, which must have made the shooting quite a bit more complicated. Nevertheless, with limited budgeting, external constraints, and hidden cameras, Majidi managed to produce a smooth and artistically told story in an urban setting. This seems to have led some of the postmodernist critics concerned with supposed “authenticity” in filmmaking to criticise Children of Heaven for being “manipulative” and not true to life. But I would argue that it captures and presents the very real, dramatic experience of children better than almost any film. All films are, to a certain extent, “manipulative”, but Children of Heaven is far more true to life concerning the emotional ups and downs of a child. It compares favourably to two other monumental achievements in cinematic storytelling about children, Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di Biciclette, 1948) and Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955).

Throughout the film, the two child leads, in particular Amir Farrokh Hashemian, who plays Ali, experience and express fears, expectations, and concerns that dominate their worlds. There is the fear of punishment, the desperate need for approval from adults, and the concern for following and living up to the all-powerful laws that have been set up for them by adults. And, of course, there is the feeling of loyalty and comradery among their siblings and peers. We can talk about these ideas abstractly, but they come back to our recollections powerfully when we see them portrayed so well by the players in Children of Heaven. On numerous occasions Ali is unable to give satisfactory account for his actions to the demanding adults around him and is driven to the point of tears. We feel his desperation and share his dreams.

Thoughout much of the film, Ali and Zahra are shown sprinting through the alleys of their neighborhood in utter desperation. This is not fun; it is, for them, almost a matter of life-and-death. The cinematography here is excellent, capturing the breakneck speed that must be adhered to in order to keep their secret for another day. And no matter how fast they run, it not quite good enough. When we get to the final cross-country race, it is a continuation of this desperate and exhausting search for salvation. This is what youth often is much of the time – a world of impossible demands and an unending sequence of somewhat scary encounters with intolerant adults. We adults have forgotten this, but the interior reality of this experience all comes back when we watch this film.

The bittersweet ending of the film is important, but seems to have been misunderstood by many commentators. Ali has failed in his quest to win the shoes and save his sister (and himself) from further suffering. He sees himself as a failure. It is not a feel-good story; it's a story of frustrated dreams. We observers know, however, what Ali doesn’t: that his father has, in the meantime, already bought replacement shoes for both himself and for his sister, Zahra. We want to comfort him and praise him for being so good – for loving his sister, for helping his parents, and for being everything that a parent would want a child to be. Tomorrow we know this particular drama will turn for the better, but the dramatic life of a child, with all its never-ending anxieties, will go on. This is the essence of childhood, captured on film.
★★★★

"Father" - Majid Majidi (1996)

Majid Majidi, the greatest of Iranian filmmakers, was born in 1959 and early on became involved in the Tehran theatre and film scene. His first feature, Baduk, was released in 1992 and though very well received has not been released on video or DVD. Father (Pedar) was his second outing and already displays the uncanny skills of a master film storyteller.

The story concerns Mehrolla, a young boy about 14 years old, who has just spent four months away from his village, working in the bazaar of an Iranian seaport city. From the opening scenes in the city, we quickly learn that the boy is quiet, but independent minded and somewhat rebellious towards authority. When the boy makes the long journey across the arid, desolate south Iranian landscape and arrives back home with his hard-earned money, we eventually learn (a) that the boy had been working to support his mother and three sisters after the recent death of his father and (b) that during the boy’s absence his mother had married a local police officer. What could be more disruptive for a rebellious boy than to have his mother secretly marry into the police?

Mehrolla, rejecting his mother’s decision to remarry, refuses to live in her new home (the policeman’s) and instead camps out in the old family home that is now abandoned. He intends to stay there, but after falling seriously ill, he is brought back to his family home against his will. Although the step-father makes some gestures of conciliation, there are matters of pride and “face” that neither Mehrollah nor his new father can overcome. One night Mehrolla steals his father’s gun and is about to kill him, when a noise interrupts his plans, and he runs away. Thereafter, he and his best friend flee back to the seacoast city, but now the father, having had his service revolver stolen by a teenage boy, is in hot pursuit.

Eventually the father makes it to the city on his motorcycle, catches Mehrolla in the city, and after handcuffing the boy to his motorcycle, sets about on the long journey home. But getting home is not so easy and consumes the second half of the film. Several times Mehrolla escapes, but because he is an inexperienced boy alone in a desolate wilderness, he is recaptured by his father. All this time, there is something of a cat-and-mouse game between Mehrolla and his father concerning who will have the upper hand and command respect. Eventually, though, their motorcycle engine gives out, and they must proceed the rest of the way on foot across the desert. Gradually the two travellers, along with the viewing audience, come to realise that their lives are now at stake, and matters of pride are becoming less important.

After staggering through dust storms and blistering heat from exposure to the sun, they are unable to find any water that could save them from imminent death. The father, unable to go on, finally uncuffs the boy and urges him to save himself while he still has some strength. But the boy drags his father forward a few feet at a time in a seemingly hopeless and self-defeating effort to find something in the barren landscape. Nearing the end of his strength, the boy notices some wild camels in the distance and makes his way towards them, where he discovers a small waterhole. He staggers back to his father and just manages to drag him to the hole and attain salvation for them both. The closing shots of the two semiconscious principals lying half-submerged in the water pool, with the boy dimly aware of a dropped family photograph featuring his stepfather floating towards him in the water, not only bring an artistic closure to the story, but generate in us an epiphany of sympathy and understanding that echoes what is going on in the boy’s consciousness.

So Father has a relatively simple theme of two uncompromising males who, after sharing a difficult life-altering experience, become somewhat reconciled. What makes this a great film, and why, in general, is Majidi’s cinematic style so compelling? First, we should comment that Majidi’s visual style uses the full range of cinematic expression and contrasts significantly with that of Abbas Kiarostami (mostly long-lasting medium-closeup shots), Babak Payami (mostly long-lasting long shots) and Mohsen Makhmalbaf (static and awkward cinematography). These other directors have all attracted interest from intellectual film critics partly because of their exotic and minimalist forms of expression, which contrast so drastically with our own cultural conventions. Majidi, on the other hand, like his compatriot, Dariush Mehrjui, uses finely crafted film expression technique that is more immediately accessible for Western audiences. (It’s worth remarking that the acting by the four principals in Father is superb, featuring a nuanced characterisation of the step-father by Mohammad Kasebi, who had also starred in Majidi’s Baduk and had earlier co-starred in 1985 with Majidi, himself, in Makhbalbaf’s Boycott.) Another feature of Majidi’s films that distinguishes him from his Iranian contemporaries is that his narrative themes, while authentically embedded in the Iranian cultural milieu, are more universal and can be readily apprehended by people from all over the world. In this sense, Majidi’s expression is somewhat like Zhang Yimou’s, whose films resonate with audiences across a wide global spectrum. However, the filmmaker that most easily comes to my mind when I watch Majidi’s films if Federico Fellini. I will try to elaborate on this in subsequent posts.

Note that a mainstream filmmaker trying to raise funds for a project with the basic scenario of Father might have difficulty finding backers, since most film investors only want to invest their money in projects with “tangible” positives, such as a shooting script filled with winning dialogue or having big stars lined up. For this reason, we don’t usually see mainstream English language films of this nature, but if we go back to some European films of the 1950s and 1960s, we find moody, psychologically expressionistic and existential works from Fellini, Antonioni, and others that more often address universal themes of human existence. So if you’re looking for a modern Fellini, try to track down some Majidi films.

A significant aspect of Majidi’s films is the way they end. At the close of Father, as with three other films of his that I have seen, Color of Paradise, Children of Heaven, and Baran, there is an epiphanic moment that raises the viewer above the particular circumstances of the story and yields an otherwise inexpressible feeling of the grandeur and majesty of life. We are left with a sympathy for the principal characters, who are always humanly fallible and grounded in their specific situations, and we are also left to contemplate the inevitably tragic, yet beautiful, circumstances of life. This is a consistent feature of Majidi, but Fellini was able to achieve this, too.

Mehrjui has an element of this contemplative look at human existence, as well, but his endings are always more pessimistic and not as uplifting as those of Majidi. In any case, there is ample room for both modes of expression. Given the aesthetic affinities between Majidi and Mehrjui, one might wonder if Iranian filmmakers are more attuned to this kind of expression, thanks to their rich, philosophical, and Sufi-influenced cultural traditions. The great Iranian Sufi poets, such as Attar and Hafez, expressed themselves along these lines, as well.

Finally, we might have to acknowledge that it is dangerous to make a film such that its full appreciation is dependent on the final shots. It’s almost like composing a piece of music that is dependent on the final note. Can we consider a film to be a great if it is so carefully focused? Yes, in Majidi's case, we can.
★★★★