A sightless boy sees more of God’s green
earth than his sighted father can in Majid Majidi’s majestic The
Colour of Paradise – another profound entry in the remarkable
catalogue of contemporary Iranian films that focus on children and landscape
to express yearnings for innocence and faith. The term is over for Mohammad
who attends a boarding school for blind children in Tehran.
But his father, a poor widower hoping to remarry, only reluctantly takes
him home to the country for the summer; who wants a blind child in the
dowry? At least there Mohammad has his two affectionate younger sisters,
and his adored grandmother, a warm, holy old woman whose generous love
for her grandson is as reliable as the sun and wind and flowers and
birds so simply, reverently photographed by the painterly filmmaker.
Majidi contrasts Mohammad’s frustration and loneliness –
never more powerful than when the boy can only hear what’s around
him while we can see intensely colored natural beauty – with moments
of rapture when the boy, with his sensitive, searching fingers, touches
leaves, water, or his patient Granny’s familiar face. (Her mottled,
calloused hands, he tells her, feel white and soft.) His eyes may be
useless (the untrained child actor really is blind), but Mohammad sees
what’s important. And in a scene as wrenching as any more Westernized
climax, the weeping boy cries out his anguish.
His father’s vision is limited, metaphorically, until tragedy
washes his eyes clear. Majidi is empathetic to the older man’s
own struggles; he’s also attuned to the movement of girls, aged
countrywomen, and airborne seedpods, all part of a divine plan. A lot
happens in The Colour of Paradise, some of it shocking. Yet
while never slow, the film feels quiet and spacious, like a prayer.
– Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
In one way or another, the cinema of every nationality addresses the
tenuous relationship of man and nature (in the United States it tends
to be through bloated disaster epics like Twister). But in
Iran this grandest of themes is almost a national obsession. And in
Majid Majidi's stunningly beautiful film […] that relationship
is evoked with an ecstatic sensuousness along with an awed awareness
of nature's destructive power that are nothing less than extraordinary.
As much as any film can, this explicitly religious movie offers a visionary
experience of the natural world. Moving through fields of flowers and
misty forests, across streams and into the craggy backwoods country,
The Colour of Paradise makes sure that we hear as well as see
the rugged Iranian landscape in all sorts of weather. The soundtrack
is a constantly shifting chorus of birds (especially woodpeckers), insects,
wind and rain. In the forest scenes, an ominous, possibly supernatural
cry is occasionally heard from afar. – Stephen Holden, New
York Times
Watch
the trailer here
|
