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REVIEW

• 1/2

‘’Color of Paradise

Directed by Majid Majidi

Stars Mohsen Ramezani, Elham Sharim

Rated PG

Opens June 16

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In his remarkable film about the daily stress of poverty on a Tehran family, Children of Heaven, Iranian director Majid Majidi showed a potential for sentimentality giving way to bathos.

But while Children reigned in its maudlin impulses, Majidi’s latest venture, The Color of Paradise, indulges them. Again choosing to tell his story from a child’s perspective, The Color of Paradise opens as 8-year-old Mohammed (Mohsen Ramezani) waits for his father to pick him up for summer vacation from his boarding school for the blind. But his widowed father, Hashem (Hossein Mahjub), arrives pitifully late, making the school administrators aware that his blind son is a burden and a liability in attracting a new wife.

The Color of Paradise begins promisingly with an almost documentarian vantage, focusing on the parallel universe Mohammed’s blindness opens up to him. His hearing is so acute and his love of nature so strong, Mohammed can detect the sound of a baby bird fallen from its nest deep in the forest. Majidi sets up a heartrending status quo as he introduces the rituals of Mohammed’s school, where the children listen raptly to music tapes, practice their Braille dictation and, in the film’s most moving scene, are reunited with their parents for the school holiday.

But Majidi quickly abandons the purity and understatement of the film’s opening for a caricatured battle of wills between Hashem, who wants to dump Mohammed at the first possible opportunity, and Mohammed’s loving granny (Salime Feizi), whose face is as sweet and leathery brown as a dried apple. Taking the child into her home in the mountains, she tries desperately to stave off Hashem’s single-minded desire to get rid of Mohammed.

Majidi presents this tension between the loving granny and selfish father in such a ludicrously obvious manner, it registers with the force of a gun shot. Hashem is presented as not only a rotten father but a jackass to boot, as when he goes a courtin’ his fiancee, amusing her by hanging like a monkey from a tree above her garden fence. But a father who tries to abandon his adorable blind son is enough of a monster without all these attempts to further vilify him in Majidi’s crumb trail of character traits.

If Majidi knows anything, it’s how to stack a deck: blind, helpless, dough-faced kid and angelic granny vs. a lust-drunk, neglectful daddy. In this storybook tale of good and bad, characters are cooked, seasoned and cut into itty-bitty digestible pieces - a tactic that might work for children but is deeply patronizing to an adult sensibility. ??

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