It’s hard to convey the feeling of seeing Majid Majidi‘s wondrous 1999 The Color of Paradise from Iran. We watched it on a Netflix DVD on a large screen television. Though not as enveloping as a movie theater it offers good sound, detail and color. Nevertheless, at home we usually find ourselves popping up to get something from the kitchen, using the pause button for bathroom breaks, talking over a few lines to comment on a scene or remember some to-do for tomorrow. We did’t budge for the entire 90 minutes of this award wining Iranian film.
It began with the opening scene at a boarding school for blind children in Tehran. I don’t recall ever seeing a movie in which blind children appear, except perhaps as bit characters in Italian neo-realism or a British Dicken’s film. [The list of American movies about blindness just about begins and ends with Helen Keller variations.] Majid has us right in amongst the boys [all boys] furiously taking dictation in Braille. They are all blind, some with corollary conditions, all about 1o years old. It is time for vacation and they anxiously pack their small sacks with precious belongings, leave their dormitory room and are met by anxious, and embracing parents — all the women in dark burkhas. Everyone is met except Muhammed, who waits forlornly, listening to the birds. Throughout the film we see him cocking his head to catch and decipher the “language” of the birds, of which there are a great and glorious variety — in sound only. One call is particularly, eerily recognizable and appears throughout the film. I wish it had been identified somehow. I suspect it is intended as a symbolic note –perhaps as the hoopoe in the classic “Conference of Birds,” calls all to greater striving towards God.
While waiting for his father, Muhammad is distracted from his own sorrow by the cheeping of a baby bird and close upon it the stalking-through-leaves, and meow, of a cat. Twice, as he cautiously pats through the leaves for the bird, he stands and chases the cat away. Finally finding a naked hatchling, he puts it in his shirt pocket and climbs the tree above it. Improbably, of course, but with courage, acute hearing, and symbolism, he finds the nest with ears and fingers and deposits the cast-off in with its siblings.
Muhammad’s father, Hashem, finally arrives and, unlike the hugging gift bearing families of the other boys, begs the school to keep him. In a wonderful bit of back-and-forth the principle and teacher shame him into his fatherly duties. It turns out that Hashem’s problem is not only his blind son, his poverty, his widowhood, two young daughters and elderly mother but that he has been wooing a not-so-desirable daughter of a slightly wealthier family. The blind son, he believes, will present problems, which he cannot afford. We are invited into a couple of wonderful gift-bearing meetings with the family of the possible bride, and some beguiling, eye-lowering scenes of her acceptance of his visits. He and his daughters get hard to work improving the mud and straw walled house, painting it in whites and blues for the coming big day.
In fact, the entire film is saturated with colors, from the girls skirts and shawls to fine, unexpected scenes of Iran’s woods, meadows and mountains — unexpected because we know so little of Iran. Perhaps we’ve seen a photograph or two of snow capped peaks, or TV footage of Tehran streets. Of course we shouldn’t be surprised, Iran is a big and richly endowed country. Majid shows us wonderful samples of that richness are unlikely to see otherwise. Really good! We sucked in our breaths several times. Not only is it the physical beauty, we learn something about people when we see the land they live in and love.
Mohammad’s granny is a marvelous old woman who assures him she loves him so much “I would die for you.” She and his two winsome sisters — in head scarves at all times, working in the fields, or at school– are ecstatic he is back home. They stand while he explores their faces with this fingers: ”You’ve grown so much!” They take him to their rural school, which is still in session. The teacher and entire class is amazed to watch him reading with his fingers. Hashem, obstinate and desperate that Muhammad not get in the way of his marriage, spirits him away to a blind carpenter he knows of, and leaves him as an apprentice. Again, just wonderful scenes as the very kind, young, blind carpenter begins to teach Muhammad about the woods they use, how to feel the shape of a bird and reproduce it by carving. Perhaps not a bad idea, we think.
Muhammad’s absence, and the reason for it, break the granny’s heart. She tells her son, “It’s not Muhammad I am worried about. It is you.” After a furious fight with him she picks up her few things and begins a trek through the rain and mud that breaks your heart, along with hers. Hashem quickly recovers himself and rushes after her, bringing her back to the house where he and the two girls tend to her in the sweetest ways. But, too late. The old woman dies, and with her, his hopes for the marriage. The men of the family return Hashem’s betrothal gifts and tell him, “The marriage is not propitious for us.”
Working as a day laborer making carbon, and other back breaking work, Hashem is of course, really desperate. Although we think of him at first as an unloving father we are drawn into the extreme difficulty of his life as he experiences it — the same that has families selling their daughters in Thailand, or committing infanticide in China. Economic hardship so extreme that sacrificing one child to save others is always a living possibility. We wonder what we would do in such impossible circumstances. With the death of his mother, and end of his marriage hopes, Hashem seems to understand that he cannot simply make his son disappear from his heart. He is loved, and brings love and so father takes the family horse and goes to retrieve Muhammad – bringing the film to one of the most powerful, heart wrenching sequences of love responding to loss I’ve ever seen in a movie.
I won’t reveal it except to say it involves extreme white water. Adding to the sense of the reality of the entire movie is some wonderment about how these scenes were filmed. This was not a richly endowed Hollywood crew that could set up river-bottom cables to control similar scenes in Meryl Streep’s (not so good) 1994 The River Wild. This was a modestly funded Iranian film crew putting on the screen some really hair-raising, and lung-filling, scenes.
Majidi has such a wonderful way with children as actors, and as subjects of his stories, it’s a safe bet to see anything he has done. His The Song of Sparrows, an equally moving film of a poor father’s love was reviewed here.
Three Monkeys — the famous three monkeys of not seeing, speaking or hearing– is a sorrowful, long-take, film of domestic life at the edge in modern Turkey. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, one of Turkey’s premier film makers, is never noted for quick-cut, action films [see review of Distant, here] but he outdoes himself here. Static shots of a room with doors and hallway on the far side are held for 30 seconds or so. A character walks in, lingers, walks out. The shot is held. Or, a head shot of a brooding, sick-at-heart man, lying on his side in bed. A strange snake-like thing appears over his shoulder: a child’s arm. The shot is held. All is motionless except the slow blinking of eyes in pain. Then the arm is pulled away. A ghostly figure recedes in the still frame. 30 seconds or so.
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