In the wonderful new film “The Color of Paradise,” Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi tries to show us how the world appears to two kinds of observer: the blind and the seeing. But, more than that, he tries to show us how a spiritual dimension often colors the physical act or sensation of “sight” — how the seeing may miss the world’s glories because their vision is poisoned by despair or hatred, how the blind may perceive more deeply if their hearts remains open.
Movies, of course, are the medium that can excel at showing us the fantastic, the horrible, the seductive. They can reveal worlds of the imagination almost impossibly gorgeous or impossibly terrifying. But they also excel at showing the more common splendors of everyday life, the transcendent beauties of the everyday.
“Paradise,” like the rest of the best new Iranian imports — and like the Italian neo-realist movies of the ’40s and ’50s (from “The Bicycle Thief” to “Bandits of Orgosolo”) that are their main models — tend to show us the latter. The best of them open up the world as it might appear to the child, the unprejudiced observer, the “innocent eye” that pioneer documentarian Robert Flaherty prized.
Majidi’s 1997 “The Children of Heaven,” the most popular Iranian film import ever on U.S. screens, was a superb example. And so, in a different way, is “Color of Paradise.” “Children of Heaven” told the story of a poor boy trying to win a citywide race to earn shoes for his little sister. “Color of Paradise” is the story of another overreaching child: a blind 8-year-old boy named Mohammed, who “sees” his surroundings with more clarity and curiosity than his angry, sighted father, Hashem.
Hashem, who works in the northern mountains while leaving Mohammed in a city boarding school, has become embittered because he believes that being saddled with a blind son is ruining his life — condemning him to menial labor in a coal mine, preventing his proposed marriage to a woman of a “good” family.
So Hashem, at the movie’s beginning, shows up late to retrieve Mohammed from the school and then actually tries to leave him at the school where he is boarded for all but the summer months. When Mohammed’s teacher gently refuses, Hashem brings the child back to their rural home to stay with his granny (Salime Feizi) and his little sisters, all of whom Mohammed dearly loves.
But Hashem remains discontent, unreasonable. Infuriated when the granny allows the boy to go to the local school, he removes Mohammed from their home and apprentices him far away to a blind carpenter — an action that precipitates several tragedies and a climactic crisis of devastating fury.
The plot of “The Color of Paradise” is so old-fashioned that it could easily have been used, almost scene for scene, in a typical American silent film of the late 1910s or 1920s. Mary Pickford and Jackie Coogan made fortunes playing little girls or boys just as unappreciated, threatened and delightfully aware and open as Mohammed.
And the ending, in which a bridge collapses and someone is borne away on a white water current, is prototypical silent-movie fare as well. It worked for D.W. Griffith and Lillian Gish in the 1920 “Way Down East” and, amazingly, it works here once again.
There is one key difference, though. The little boy who plays Mohammed, Mohsen Ramezani, is a real blind boy — as are his blind schoolmates. Also, everybody in “The Color of Paradise,” except Hossein Mahjub, who brilliantly plays the moody father, is an amateur, acting in films for the first time. It’s as if the spirits of Vittorio de Sica and Griffith were somehow melded, which may explain Majidi’s grip on our emotions. This is another near-Dickensian tale of innocence, injustice, threat and redemption.
Is that why this movie — and the other Iranian films exported to America — seem so exotic? Critics would deride a movie like this if it were made in America, accuse it of sentimentality and manipulation.
Yet, Iranian movies have come to take on a quasi-religious significance for American film buffs anyway. Perhaps that’s because the achievements and goals of these films are so strikingly different from those of even ambitious American independent films, because they reach out to audiences — and to emotions — that our own films tend to ignore or even ridicule.
The simplicity and idealism of “The Color of Paradise” are part of what makes it so attractive to near-jaded palates here. There are no evil characters in the film. Even the father is not wicked or brutal; he is instead, a man at war with his own instincts, trapped in a demeaning social role.
But there is a sense of generalized evil in everyday lives, of the temptation to selfishness, and of the ways in which all of us can become blind to those around us. Little Mohammed, unable to see the world, except through his ears and through the things he touches with his hands, still appreciates it with an almost desperate intensity. That world delights him: the feel of fragile birds’ eggs, of the ocean waves, of his kind old grandmother’s weathered, soft hands.
Majidi shoots most of the movie not in Tehran but in the mountain villages and farms of northern Iran. And the beauties of nature flood his film: verdant hills heavy with foliage, winding rivers, simple dirt roads. These natural splendors imbue the film with a kind of pantheistic ecstasy, a sense of the world as gloriously organic unity. That becomes the religious sense of “The Color of Paradise”: the “hand of God” that Majidi has said he intends us to sense in his last scene.
The new Iranian films, like their Italian neo-realist precursors, show us everyday beauties and the seemingly blessed lives of children — but it’s not entirely by choice. It is government censorship, especially of sexual and political matters, that drives so many Iranian directors to avoid dealing with complex adult themes, or even with adult characters, unless the adult tales can be set in the pre-Khomeini past, or somehow masked by symbolism.
Instead, the best of them often focus on children. (Iran’s most honored director, Abbas Kiarostami, has said that he will not portray women as major characters in his film, because censorship strictures on women’s apparel and daily life would make the portrayals false.)
Despite all this, the best of these films open up the world in a subtly thrilling way. Some Americans yearn for the simplicity of these films (“The Children of Heaven,” Kiarostami’s “Trilogy” and “Taste of Cherry,” Jafir Panahi’s “The White Balloon,” Amir Naderi’s “The Runner,” Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s “Gabbeh” and, at the last Cannes Film Festival, daughter Samira Makhmalbaf’s “Blackboards”) because our films seem to have become too jaded or too cynical — because our mass audiences and filmmakers (who once loved this type of story) don’t believe or swallow the old positive idealistic themes anymore.
“The Color of Paradise,” with its natural poetics and love of the world, lets us indulge that yearning: one really too deep to be dismissed as sentimentality. With its poor little blind boy, courageous, mistreated granny and tormented, divided father, this is a movie that seems at times laced with melodrama, seasoned with silent-movie tears.
But, for any audience willing to open up their hearts and eyes, “Paradise” offers something precious. It tells us, honestly and convincingly, why love matters, what the heart can see, what the world has to offer us all. These, actually, are not simple things.
`THE COLOR OF PARADISE’
(star) (star) (star) 1/2
Directed and written by Majid Majidi; photographed by Mohammad Davudi; edited by Hassan Hassandoost; sets designed by Aghar Nezhad-Imani; music by Ali Reza Kohandirie; produced by Mehdi Karimi. Farsi (Persian), subtitled. A Sony Pictures Classics release; opens Friday at The Music Box Theater. Running time: 1:30. No MPAA rating (some intense scenes of physical danger to a child).
THE CAST
Mohammad ………. Mohsen Ramezani
Hashem ………… Hossein Mahjub
Granny ………… Salime Feizi
