CHILDREN OF HEAVEN, THE

-By Maria Garcia

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Movies about children for adult audiences are rarely commercial successes. Narrative films such as Mike Newell's Into the West and John Sayles' The Secret of Roan Inish, and experimental ones like the Australian The Quiet Room, by writer/director Rolf DeHeer, are only a few recent examples. That's because, for all our expressed concern about the lives of children, we still fail to accept the fact that they have spiritual lives not very different from our own, and that they suffer as profoundly and as deeply as we do. The ravages of poverty, illness and violence affect children as keenly as they affect adults-perhaps even more dramatically-yet as Majid Majidi illustrates in his exquisite film, The Children of Heaven, young people often possess greater spiritual and emotional reserves than we do.

Set in Majidi's native Tehran, The Children of Heaven is the story of a brother and sister, Ali and Zahra. The film opens with Ali (Mohammad Amir Naji) sitting beside a shoemaker who is repairing a tiny pair of worn shoes. Ali then carries the shoes to a fruit market, leaving them outside the door while he searches through the discarded cartons the vendor has pointed to. It's not an irresponsible act; Ali is simply being practical. It's a small shop. He must pick through the fruit, and he can't do that while he's holding the bag containing the shoes. A man comes along with a cart and asks the vendor if he can haul off the empty cartons. The vendor nods, and the man picks up everything outside the shop, including the bag containing the shoes. We soon learn that the shoes belong to Zahra (Mir Farrokh Hashemian), Ali's sister. The family, whose poverty makes it necessary for the children to bear many adult responsibilities, is behind on the rent for their tiny, one-room apartment. The children's father, who is employed in an office, would have to borrow to buy Zahra another pair of shoes, but without the shoes Zahra can't go to school. So the children come up with their own solution: Since Ali and Zahra go to school at different times, they decide to share Ali's equally worn sneakers. The entire film is about that bargain, and the compromises it requires of the children.

Never once does Majidi minimize the children's emotions-their guilt over lying to their parents, Zahra's shame at having to wear shoes that don't fit, and Ali's guilt for losing the shoes, which has placed his sister, whom he adores, in a situation that makes their poverty even harder for her to bear. When an athletic contest is announced at school in which Ali can win a pair of sneakers, he begs for entry; he will give the sneakers to Zahra. In their performances, the children leave no doubt about a child's capacity for suffering, and their resilience in the face of so many substantial obstacles. In their love for each other, and in their love of family-it is an act of love when the children decide not to burden their parents-Ali and Zahra illustrate the ideal of sibling relationships, but also the emotional depth and the accompanying isolation of childhood that can easily lead to great suffering.

In an exquisitely conceived sequence, Ali and his father set out to do landscaping in a wealthy neighborhood in order to earn extra money. The father, intimidated by the obvious wealth of the large, gated estates, fails to sell his service; it is only with Ali's intervention that they secure a job. The customer is an elderly man who asks Ali to play with a lonely child while his father landscapes, and for once we see him acting like the child he really is-but then we realize that Ali is working, too. On the way home, on a bicycle, Ali and his father have an accident. You're reminded of DeSica's The Bicycle Thief, of that desperation people suffer when they truly have no reserves, when on the brink of survival they're dealt yet another blow.

Inside the high-walled streets of Tehran, in the family's one-room apartment, and the walled-in school grounds, Majidi's film reflects the children's limited world, and the confinement of poverty. Only when Ali runs in the school's athletic contest do we have a glimpse of hope in the open countryside, but even then it's from a well-worn path on which the children compete. Majidi's purpose in The Children of Heaven is not to create an allegory for adults-the writer-director never questions the existence of the children's spiritual lives or their inherent dignity. He simply tells a story in which the main characters happen to be children. In this way, he has made a truly revolutionary film-not one that trumpets its uniqueness, but a film that quietly and lyrically brings you to so many revelations about the human condition which simply can't be expressed in prose. No, one would have to write poetry in order to critique such a film.

--Maria Garcia