"The Song of Sparrows" is a fitting name for the new film from
Iranian writer-director Majid Majidi. Sparrows are, after all, the most
ordinary of birds: small, brown, common. The overlooked and the
ordinary is exactly the terrain Majidi loves to walk, and we see again
in this film his deep affection for his country's common folk -- with
their meager resources, menial jobs and yet surprisingly fulfilled
lives.
That is not to say he is content to merely let the
camera linger too long or too lovingly, though the cinematography by
Tooraj Mansouri is beautiful, from sweeping rural vistas to the choking
streets of Tehran and always the faces, etched with grime and life,
eyes that pool with hurt, frustration, acceptance.
Majidi also enjoys toying with his characters, forever putting
them in situations that send their internal moral compasses spinning,
letting good and bad choices alike play out long enough for us to see
the consequences. In his 1999 Oscar-nominated "Children of Heaven," when
the girl whose one pair of shoes has been lost discovers that a
schoolmate has somehow inherited them, she begins looking for ways to
reclaim them. Yet after getting a glimpse of a life that seems more
difficult than her own, she walks away.
In "The Song of Sparrows,"
which he co-wrote with Mehran Kashani, Majidi goes down that road
again. Here we have Karim (Reza Naji), who works long days on an ostrich
farm, caring for the birds and collecting the huge, delicate eggs. But
things, which are never easy for this impoverished family man, are about
to get more difficult.
An ostrich escapes, Karim gives chase, but the bird eludes him and
he soon finds it has cost him his job. There are pressures building at
home as well. Haniyeh (Shabnam Akhlaghi), his oldest daughter, is deaf,
her hearing aid has broken and there is no money, especially now, to
replace it; and he is at odds with his young son, Hussein (Hamed
Aghazi), who with his friends has hatched a fanciful plan to raise fish
in a nearby sludge pond, a venture he is sure will turn him into a
millionaire.
But fortunes change in the most unexpected ways in
Majidi's films, and on a trip into Tehran on his aging motorbike, Karim
is mistaken for a taxi driver and a new career is born. Soon he is
motoring businessmen around the city all day, leaving each night flush
with more money than he ever imagined. He's also become a master
scavenger, with a keen eye for how to use Tehran's castoffs to enrich
the family's life. Soon TV antennas, window frames and more are strapped
to the back of the motorbike and transported home.
The more Karim
makes and the more his reclaimed junk pile grows, the more unsettled
his life becomes. The contented and generous man who had nothing has
become the discontented man, hoarding his scavenged treasures. Though
there are many morals tucked inside "The Song of Sparrows," there is
much humor too -- from the unexpected turns Karim's life takes to the
search for the ostrich that got away.
This is the fourth
collaboration for Naji and Majidi, and the actor and director feed off
each other creatively, pushing the boundaries of the characters each
time. The director is also particularly adept at eliciting wonderfully
moving and funny performances out of children. That talent, which gave
such life to "Children of Heaven," flows through "Sparrows" too, with
Aghazi, as Karim's young son, delightfully defiant and unceasingly
optimistic about his fish enterprise.
Watching his films as an American woman, though, I can't help but
be struck by the stark cultural differences in the portrayal of family
life, particularly the relationships between women and men. The
characters Majidi draws of children and their fathers are rich:
sometimes combative, always loving and textured. But the mothers never
truly emerge from the background. They are efficient, hardworking,
faithful, loved but lost to us as dimensional human beings with a range
of emotions and stories of their own to tell.
In his 2001 film
"Baran," we get a glimpse of the possibilities when it turns out that
one of the co-workers fighting for work is a woman masquerading as a man
-- the only way she would be considered for the job. But, even there,
the moral dilemma to be faced and resolved remains the province of the
men.
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