COLOR OF PARADISE, THE

-By Maria Garcia

For movie details, please click here.

The Color of Paradise opens with a black screen. As the credits appear, so do the voices of a teacher and his students. The teacher is playing snippets of different audio tapes and asking the children to identify the ones belonging to them. At first, you begin reading the credits and ignore the voices. Soon, the voices become annoying because you can't see who is speaking. The credits continue to roll against the black screen. Then you hear a woman's voice. She's singing a beautiful, mournful song, and even though the words are not subtitled, the voice reaches into some primal place within you-there is no need for words. The teacher asks the student to identify the singer. 'It's my grandmother,' the child replies. In the few minutes that have elapsed, with no images, Majid Majidi introduces you to his young protagonist's world. Mohammad (Mohsen Ramezani) and all of the children whose voices you hear are blind, but unlike the others who keep commercial music tapes, this eight-year-old boy listens to his grandmother.

Mohammad's greatest disability is not his blindness, but the attitude of his father toward it. Hashem (Hossein Mahjub) is a widower in the process of arranging a second marriage; he believes his son stands in the way of his new life. Only Granny, Hashem's mother (Salime Feizi), perceives the implications of her son's attitude toward his only son, of the hurt and humiliation it has caused Mohammad, and it is she who tries, unsuccessfully, to save Hashem. Mohammad, on the other hand, embodies the special qualities of those with inner sight: He never mistakes anyone's intentions. While he suffers deeply from his father's rejection, he comes alive in the embraces of his grandmother and his two sisters, who love him unconditionally. In contrast to Mohammad's gentleness and his unfettered worldview is the Job-like suffering of Hashem, who fails to make the connection between the resentment he feels for his son and the calamities which seem to rain upon him. For Majidi, it's a clear case of spiritual poverty, and that perspective is what makes this filmmaker so special.

In every sequence, you marvel at the startling symmetry of Majidi's film. Sounds are magnified in order to mimic Mohammad's experience of the natural world, yet the lushness of Iran's countryside, the Elysian qualities of the family farm, even the dramatic contours of Granny's face-where it seems the sufferings of a lifetime are etched into the skin-appear subdued, put in their proper place, simply part of the necessary setting for a story that has little to do with physical reality. In an early scene, Mohammad hears a bird, gropes to reach the forested area nearby, falls to his knees, and carefully sifts through layers of fallen leaves. A good deal of time passes before you realize the purpose of his actions-Mohammad heard the cry of a fallen chick. When he finds it, he climbs a tree, listening all the while for the cry of another chick, so that he can place the fallen one back in its nest. The simplicity with which Majidi depicts Mohammad's actions gives us time to contemplate the spirit of a boy who would do such a thing. In that contrast, between Majidi's cinematic simplicity and our realization of Mohammad's true nature, we experience a powerful depiction of the inner life.

The late French filmmaker Robert Bresson wrote that the purpose of film was 'not to shoot in order to illustrate a thesis or to display men and women confined to their external aspect, but to discover the matter they are made of.' In The Color of Paradise, we find what people are made of, and it isn't always comforting, but for Majidi we are all made in the image of God. For that reason alone, we have a chance at redemption. If, like Hashem, we miss that chance, there are films like this one to remind us that redemption (what Bresson calls 'grace') is always close at hand.

--Maria Garcia