(COLOR OF PARADISE)
1999



June 17, 2003
DVD
Iran
Farsi
90 minutes

A widower wishes to marry again, but is embarrassed by his young, blind son, whom he sends away to become a carpenter.

Same director as the last one, but boy has he made strides in his filmmaking skill. He also did BARAN, which was an interesting study in Afghanistan's workforce and gender issues.

In this one, a blind boy is the subject of incredible scorn by his timid father. Everyone else he comes into contact with, after the initial feeling out period, comes to see him as a smart, happy kid. This is not a disabled-overcoming-adversity film. It is just the story of a coal-mining father and the pressures he and his family have trying to raise a blind boy in the countryside. The kid is amazing. He is obviously really blind. During the wrenching scene where he cries because no one loves him, he is crying to another blind actor and you can see how hard it must have hit them both. The kid is fascinated by chirping birds, when we hear one, the rest of the soundtrack goes quiet and we only hear the birds. There is an early scene where he hears a baby bird fall from a nest and he spends the next several hours feeling on the ground for the bird, putting it in his pocket, and then climbing a tree to put it back in its nest. It was a long, wordless scene, and it set the stage for the rest of the great film. The story is basically the coming to terms with an incomplete son. But the way its filmed, with sound design and slow motion and quiet takes is surpringly good. Kiarostami may be the Iranian Scorsese, but Majid Majidi is Iran's Speilberg. He finds the emotion and easy-to-follow plots, and uses his directing skill to bring the story alive. I'm haunted by scenes where the father looks at his son on the banks of a raging river and you can somehow see him think about throwing him in. Very well done. I liked it better than Children of Heaven.

***^ Ebert
***^ Maltin
* Halliwells

8.4 Critical Consensus