Beautifully Heartbreaking

In ‘The Color of Paradise’ (‘Rang-e khoda’, 1999), we first notice Mohammad only when he’s left all alone at the school entrance, still waiting for his father to pick him up. Mohammad is perhaps eight or nine years old, is a very bright and curious lad and attends a boarding school in the city. For the summer, he will go home to his grandmother’s farm in the distant mountains, where his two sisters live and study in the village’s one-room schoolhouse.

Mohammad’s life is filled with the simple joys of childhood: reading his schoolbook, returning a hapless baby bird to its nest, studying the faces of his grandmother and siblings, getting to know the plants and flowers on the farm, enjoying the cold, rushing water of the river, listening to the birds singing, even learning the ‘language’ of woodpeckers.

It’s a very sensory world that surrounds him – but it’s also just a tactile and hearing one – for Mohammad is completely blind. He goes to a special school for blind boys in Tehran, where he stays the rest of the year, away from his family in the mountains.

Mohammad loves his books, and at the village, expresses a desire to go to the same school that his sisters attend. When he comes as a guest, he makes such an impression that the teacher allows him to return with his sisters the following day. However, thanks to decisions taken by his fretful and unimaginative widower father, he will be forced to spend most of the season away from his beloved grandmother, sisters, farm, and village schoolroom.

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I almost hate to see another film by Iranian writer-director Majid Majidi. I so loved his heartbreaking ‘Children of Heaven’ (1997), but just as with the other film, Mr Majidi’s ‘The Color of Paradise’ also leaves me emotionally drained in the end. It’s lovely, but can be a bit much to take.

Again he elicits another affecting and naturalistic performance from his actor, Mohsen Ramezani, a blind young boy who plays Mohammad. Mohammad smiles with delight when he’s happy – hearing the chirping of birds is enough to set him off – and cries when he is upset, fearful or disappointed. He’s just like any young boy, yet such mundane moments become ones of extraordinary poignancy in the film.

I admit that at the beginning, it was a tad disconcerting to see all these blind children at the school, but that unease lifted before long. Mohammad really receives no special treatment, condescending or otherwise, from anyone else for his blindness. One quickly gets used to his condition and soon regards him as just another regular, sighted boy. (It’s astonishing to watch the blind children write their lessons in Braille, aided by a rectangular plastic grid and a large needle – a sight amazing to behold for the speed with which the students do it.)

Watching Mohammad and his sisters at play on the farm comes as a refreshing antidote to most modern portrayals of children. It’s nice to see children behaving as real children onscreen, unlike those wisecracking little brats so celebrated (or reflected?) in Hollywood movies, mini-monsters intent on making life hell for everyone else around them. There’s a rare authenticity to Mohammad’s simple expressions of love and generosity for his family as shown in those thoughtful little gifts he brings them, something increasingly rare in Western films (and life?) anymore.

Unlike Mohammad or his grandmother, who each show hints of a steely core, Mohammad’s father is weak at the centre and cannot bear all the misfortunes that plague him. He seems blind to the concept of hope, and feels wholly incapable of caring for his three young children left to him with the death of his wife (an event that occurs long before the film begins). The grandmother provides some help and comfort to the family, but the burdens of his situation threaten to completely overwhelm Mohammad’s father. He earns a meagre living selling small rugs in the city and working at the village charcoal factory. In order, perhaps, to get help with raising his children he hopes to marry a neighbour’s daughter soon. It’s very telling of the man’s impoverished spirit when his own perceptive mother says to him, ‘It’s you I’m worried about, not [Mohammad].’ Hossein Mahjoub plays the father with a great deal of honesty, although the fragility of his character draws more pity than sympathy from one.

We are shown the tangible pleasures derived from perceiving the world as Mohammad does. You might just see nature with fresh eyes and a renewed sense of wonder after this. Mohammad Davudi’s subtly gorgeous photography evokes the summery Iranian landscape with loads of poetic imagery. Such views of Iran are almost unknown in the West, whose inhabitants know this country solely through the parochial and largely ignorant lens of the Western news media. Here one will marvel at its verdant mountains, its sun-drenched fields of grass and wild flowers, its bounding rivers and fog-tinged forests. You can almost feel the warm breeze on your skin, with the sunshine shimmering on the trees and the leaves rustling on the branches – scenes that recall those lovely, summery Parisian backdrops in the films of Eric Rohmer.

There’s Mohammad in his hat and dark glasses, standing in fields of poppies and green wheat. His curious hands are stretched out before him, gently caressing and exploring the flowers and leaves. At the riverbank where Mohammad plays, you can see so clearly to the bottom that you’re tempted to dip your hand in that cool, clean water, too. Colourful flowers of yellow, red and lavender are gathered from the fields and dropped by the handful into cauldrons of hot liquid. They float prettily on the surface for a scant few seconds just before the mixture is stirred and colours extracted to dye Grandma’s yarns.

Through many scenes of quiet intensity, Mr Majidi leaves no viewer’s heart untouched. Small, happy, quotidian details become sadly beautiful things. Tragedies strike at Mohammad’s family, with incidents that feel genuine, although the plot isn’t wholly airtight. A few turns involving the Grandmother (Salameh Feyzi) seem motivationally dubious, and a random incident pushes pathos to the limit. On the whole, though, events are generally driven by the characters' hopes and fears. So while Mohammad finds only enchantment when the birds sing, his agitated father can only hear one eerie birdcall in the entire forest, a sound that seems to portend ominous things for him. A later sequence has clouds drifting across the skies to cloak the mountains in a thick veil of mist, as if to hint at some kind of premonitory phenomenon, too.

Conflicts arise between father and son, and mother and son, with the issue of parental and filial duties continually rearing its head. The film even dares to raise fundamental questions about God/Allah/the Great Deity above. It goes straight to the heart of the matter, wondering, with a measure of doubt and exasperation, about God’s real intentions for these pitiful humans forever struggling on the earth below.

Without giving away the ending, I’ll just say that the final fifteen minutes can really test one’s emotional fortitude. The finale works, largely because one so desperately wants it to, although others of more sceptical bent might disagree.

Two classic films kept haunting me as I watched this: Vittorio de Sica’s stark neo-realistic prototype, ‘The Bicycle Thief’ (‘Ladri di biciclette’, 1948) and Satyajit Ray’s unadorned storytelling in ‘Pather Panchali (1955). Mr Majidi’s films hark back to the unostentatious style peculiar to these great directors, whose films relied almost entirely on a series of carefully composed, unvarnished, unpretentious images for emotional impact. As with those classics, it’s the essence and poignancy of human beings that underpin every tale. Any distracting, superficial, and materialistic concerns of modern life are completely stripped away. Such films have almost vanished entirely from the body of Western cinema, with only very rare exceptions (Polish Englishman Pawel Pawlikowski’s recent film possesses a similarly sublime and spare sensibility). Funny, but after seeing ‘The Color of Paradise’, I felt as if my brain had been nicely cleansed of so much irrelevant junk and dross as well.

One doesn’t see films like this to ‘enjoy’ them; such works exist for more than just entertainment. These films strike at a deeper, instinctive and human level to create a profoundly moving experience in the viewer. It’s a powerful, tender and bittersweet feeling that one is left with after it’s over, which isn’t such a bad place to be. Four-and-a-half stars.