No one is making more consistently humanistic movies than Iranian writer-director Majik Majidi.
Within the past five years, he delivered a pair of masterworks about 8-year-old boys mature and self-sacrificing beyond their years.
In "Children of Heaven," a twist on Vittorio De Sica's "The Bicycle Thief," a child does everything imaginable to locate and retrieve his little sister's lost shoes. In "The Color of Paradise," a boy copes with the understanding he's a burden to his poor father.
Now, in "Baran," a self-centered young man outgrows his rage.
He's Lateef (Hossein Abedini), an Iranian who works for the benevolent Memar (Mohammad Reza Naji) at a dusty high-rise construction site in northern Teheran.
Lateef delivers tea and snacks to the laborers and runs errands for Memar.
Wages are low for the Iranians but even worse for the Afghan refugees who fled the Taliban and here are illegally employed. (There were 1.4 million Afghan refugees in Iran when the film was made in 2000.)
When Najaf (Gholam Ali Bakhshi), an Afghan widower-laborer with five children, is disabled by a fall from the building, Memar hires Najaf's son Rahmat (Zahra Bahrami) as the replacement.
Rahmay is small and weak, though, and cannot carry the 50-pound cement stacks. Memar moves the newcomer into Lateef's cushy job and makes Lateef the sack carrier. Uh-oh.
Perhaps because of our fund of cross-dressing entertainments from "Some Like It Hot" to "Yentl," we can't help being aware from the outset that Rahmat is really a girl (named Baran, which means "rain").
From the moment Lateef discovers the charade, he understands what was until then his inexplicable attraction (a la "Victor/Victoria"). The others give no thought to the comically feminine touches Rahmat brings to her work.
They're all aware, though, of the dangers the Afghans face if found by building inspectors.
Lateef becomes obsessive about protecting Baran, a dedication fraught with sacrifice that exposes the shallowness and absurdity of most movie romances.
Poverty is so widespread and survival is so difficult that choices carry risks beyond the imaginings of most Americans.
Money is so scarce that the theft of it can wipe out years of work. Everyone seems to have a parent, a sibling or a child desperate for medical attention.
Compound their familial worries with the searches for illegal immigrants, rivalries among themselves and poverty, and you have the world inhabited by young people maturing beyond their years.
Majidi sometimes lingers longer than seems necessary on Mohammad Davoudi's cinematography or on scenes designed to emphasize a way of life, but his movie depicts a credible moral transformation.
Day-to-day life can't be dull when half of one's focus is always on just getting through it.
| 'Baran' |
Director: Majik Majidi
Stars: Hossein Abedini, Zahra Bahrami, Mohammad Reza Naji
MPAA Rating: PG, for language and brief violence
Where: The Oaks, Oakmont
