Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Tue Jun 23, 2009 5:26 pm 
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WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD LITTLE BOYS AND THEIR GOLDFISH

Tears and smiles and ostrich eggs

The Song of Sparrows is at once a beautifully humanistic film in the tradition of Italian neorealism, and an aimless ramble whose perceived themes and moral lessons are hard to decode. The protagonist, Karim (Reza Naji), lives somewhere a motorcycle ride away from Tehran with his wife and three children. Karim is an industrious bumpkin, essentially goodhearted but given to moments of meanness and rage. He gets fired from his job as an ostrich wrangler when during a move of the ostriches to another pen, while he's screaming at the men who're trying to help him, one of the big birds escapes. In one of the film's arresting sequences partly shot from a great distance, he wanders high up in the hills disguised as an ostrich, trying, in vain, to lure back the wayward bird.

One thing leads to another. Karim's deaf older daughter Haniyeh (Shabnam Akhlaghi) drops her hearing aid into the dank storage tank water where his son is playing and it won't work. And so, without money, he goes to Tehran to repair the hearing aid. A man jumps on the back of his motorcycle and gives directions and before he knows it he's one of the city's legion of cycle taxi drivers transporting men and merchandise around town and receiving what for him seem enormous sums for this work.

A series of little vignettes of riders follows. People give him things they consider junk that he thinks are better than what he has at home -- a blue door, and a TV aerial more sophisticated than his neighbors'. He starts an accumulation of this stuff. Some of the men cheat him. Others give him bonuses. All are loud and self-absorbed.

Reza Naji, a regular in Majidi's films, looks like a bedraggled version of Judd Hirsh or the Forties and Fifties Hollywood regular William Bendix. He alternates between moments of taciturnity and hysterical screaming, the latter often directed at his little boy Hussein (Hamed Aghazi), whose entrepreneurial efforts with the storage tank (he and a handful of identical looking boys plan to turn it into a fish farm) he strongly disapproves of, presumably out of pride and a will to dominate. He also brings his gentle, sweet-natured (and generally passive) wife Narges (Maryam Akbari) to tears by violently taking back the blue door when she's given it to a friend. This occasions another of the film's memorable images: Karim carrying the blue door back home across the barren country landscape, seen from high above. He quietly soothes his wife and eases her tears. He's a kind father after his fashion but much of the time his face expresses only blank weariness.

Some viewers interpret the story as a contrast of corrupt city and honest country and see Karim as being tempted into misbehavior by the luxuries of Tehran, but that is an exaggeration. He continues his dogged, not very smart striving from first to last and never stints in his sometimes harsh, sometimes kind, efforts to be a good father to his family. The movie does convey a sense of the prosperity (and ugliness) of Iran's crowded capital. There are well-dressed men constantly on their cell phones rushing around with wads of cash. One of them is moving into a large house and makes Karim carry things. Later Karim is part of a caravan of several dozen motorcyclists sent from a warehouse carrying new appliances and gets lost from the group. He takes the fridge he's been assigned home and later returns with it and tries to sell it.

Some are seduced by the cinematography and it has its moments. What's more engaging is the specificity of the incidents. You learn about motorcycle taxis, and how to move an ostrich (you blindfold it and push it backwards). Judging by the uplifting tone of earlier Majidi films (all shown in the US) like Children of Heaven, The Color of Paradise, Baran, and The Willow Tree, the director is concerned with faith (and the loss of it) but also with social realism, mostly focusing on the poor and the discriminated against but with occasional looks at the middle class.

An accident involving the big pile of junk Karim has collected puts him out of commission and may restore his equilibrium. At least it keeps him at home. Haniyeh's hearing aid seems to have gone back to working on its own. Earlier, Hussein and his buddies succeed in buying a giant plastic "bucket" (the subtitles aren't very good) full of goldfish for the storage tank, which they've cleaned up. But the "bucket" breaks and the boys lose all their fish. The film's most touching scene comes when the boys are crying in the back of a truck and Karim sings a fatalistic, but also funny, song that makes all their tears turn to smiles. It's a totally sentimental moment that I was utterly powerless to resist.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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