The Kite — Over the Lebanese-Israeli Border — a Film

Many years ago I translated The Manuscript of a Crow, a short story by Spanish author Max Aub, the protagonist of which was a crow relating its observations of human beings as he saw them in their concentration camps.  He was astounded that a man could go to sleep a Pole and wake up a German and then, not too much later go out shopping and come back to find himself a Russian.  Human history never stops spinning its wheels in the same ruts and so a similar story is found in Randa Chahal Sabbag‘s wonder of a film, The Kite.  Released in 2003 it apparently never made the round of US art houses, and too bad for all of us.

Set on the Lebanese-Israeli border where the barbed wire and watch towers divide two Druze villages, the story is of  Lamia [ Flavia Bechara]the most charming 15 year old girl you’re likely to have seen in recent movie time. She is sent off to marry her cousin Samy [Edmond Haddad] on the Israeli side because well, the men have decided so.  The opening scenes have her flying kites with her sweet and much loved younger brother, right along the border.  Her wing-like, white kite gets away from her and lodges up against a barbed wire fence.  She sets off to get it, to the screaming fear of the kids, and a handsome Druze guard: she is walking across a mine field.

Because of the separation of the two villages, families, cousins, sisters, the negotiation for her marriage takes place between the two gates, via bullhorns, womaned by the most raucous women you’ve likely ever heard, abaya clad or not.  She’s ready for marriage yells her mother, “She started menstruating two years ago!”  When it’s suggested the new husband isn’t man enough for the girl — “beautiful from the tips of her toes to the ends of her fingers”– his mother yells back that he is such a stud he mounted a nanny goat when he was only seven!

Lamia wants nothing to do with the arrangement.  The two families swap videos of the intendeds.  She is not impressed; his not much more so.  But, what does a 15 year old girl have to say in a rural Arab village?  Not much.  After the wedding festivities on her side of the border, off she goes, fully gowned, alone, along the dusty “crossing” through the no-man’s-land to meet her new family.

It does not go well.  And, she has caught a glimpse of the handsome guard catching a glimpse of her catching a glimpse of him.  Nice dream sequences follow.  More hollering back and forth across the divide, as Lamia proves impossible.  Her rather sweet groom doesn’t insist, and returns her insults rather more sadly than she hands them out.  “I only wanted to help you.  You can go back.”  She being the stubborn girl she is — wait till you meet her mother!– says she doesn’t want to go back.  She wants to stay here!  Eventually she is returned  and the film uses the opening white kite to pull us into a marvelous magical-realism ending in which love and transcendence and erotic longing suggest, at least in the imagination, the only way to dissolve the wounds of politics, armies and ancient hatreds.

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The Mother of the Bride – Screwball Comedy from Egypt, 1967

Comedies of family life have been a regular feature of movies and television in the US from the 1950s right down to today.  From Jackie Gleason and Audry, Ricky and Lucy with no kids, to Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best with cute, sometimes mischievous kids viewers enjoyed watching beleaguered men try to stay in charge while wives took care of everything that mattered.   Sometimes the kids bossed each other around, sometimes got into trouble.  Dad was besieged with money worries, mom was always to the go-to-gal.  It seems the same was true in Egypt.

Mother of the Bride from 1963 is  cut from the same cloth. Father Hussein, a mid-level government functionary, with enough time on his hands to produce 7 children, from marriageable age to a suckling child, is besieged by the racket in the house, the demands of his wife to pitch in and deal with the kids before she explodes.  The eldest daughter sees, is introduced to, becomes betrothed and married to a young man in less than a month.  The  second daughter, caught up in the wedding planning – and slightly wider dating parameters with an engaged sister–  follows in the same path, and begs permission to be married just as the nuptials of the first are finished.

Money, virtue, money, family insults, childhood behavior, money are the main markers of a mildly amusing movie. We are taken by many similarities of US movies we may have seen, and struck by the differences. Three younger kids share a triple bunk bed. The two older girls share a room. The teen-age boy is gunning to be in charge of family morals and the four year old is cute and obnoxious – like one of the Spanky and Our Gang kids – asking for a piaster for anything he does.  Mom and Dad make side comments to the kids about the other. “Your mother is hot-tempered.  She must have some Turkish blood in her!”

I suppose the most striking thing to an American audience will be the high decibel level of family discourse. Everything, it seems, is carried on in shouts – from the mother, to the small-fry. It’s sort of like child-rearing by verbal assault, though perhaps not that far from ideas we might have about Italian, Irish or Jewish immigrants in our movies.  And I was struck, that in a 1963 movie, Egypt or elsewhere, that the mother would be shown pulling her breast out to feed the child.  It was quick, but it was there.

Besides the lightning fast engagement party arranged by the groom’s parents with a formal visit to the bride-to-be’s house – with her OK, as this is a liberal household– the most memorable scene is when the grooms’ family re-visits to complain about the cheapness of the bride’s father in getting the new apartment furnished. We have already seen mother, father and daughter in department stores, he approving of the cheaper goods while mother, once he walks away, orders the more expensive. The groom’s mother, father and aunt show up and abuse the bride’s family, with threats of withdrawing the engagement unless things get better fast. It’s a memorable little bit, even if over-done.

We learn that, at least in those years, the groom’s family paid a dowry, or bride price, in cash, to the bride’s father who  is then responsible for setting the couple up. Papa Hussein is stretched to the limit, and after the abusive visit, figures out that a temporary loan from some government funds in his safe will see him through. Of course the anxiety of getting caught becomes part of the story – right thorough to the wedding night. Every thing ends happily, as such films must and will plenty of ululating by the women, as this is a movie from Egypy

Atef Salem, with32 films to his credit, including the noirish  Struggle on the Nile, reviewed here earlier, put together a good cast and handles the fast moving action inside the house quite well — people coming and going in and out of the frame in a kind of synchronized chaos.  At one point a goat and some chickens join the parade.

Taheya Carrioca who plays Zeinab, the mother, was one of Egypt’s great leading ladies, with 59 some film roles before her death in 1999.  Imad Hamdi, as Hussein the father, was even more employed with 96 titles to his name.

As is true with most of these Arabic language movies I’ve been watching, the main reason in 2011 to watch them is curiosity about how the other half live, as it were.  The world is so much smaller now than 50 years ago.  We can hear and see our neighbors much more clearly but we still have some last century ideas about who they are and what kind of devils they are.  Movies are just one way to begin to dissolve the knots on those ideas and be more ready to acknowledge them as another bunch pretty much like we are, warts and all, weddings and all, distraught fathers and all.

 

 

 

Afrita Hanem: The Genie Lady — Egypt, 1951

Egypt as Egyptian movie goers saw it in 1951 (1949?) in Afrita Hanem: The Genie Lady [also known as Little Miss Devil] sings and dances onto the screen in this musical comedy with a magic lantern and a beautiful genie at the center of it.  There is a cave, of course, with an old man who appears and disappears at will, an old house transformed into a palace at the clap of the hands, fine food brought by finely dressed servants and plenty more.  Being a musical there are love ballads sung to maidens on balconies; being a love story bouquets of flowers brought to the object of affection; being a comedy those flowers dumped in the back alley as the swain makes his pleas.  More than that, there is a 30,000 dinar dowry  that must be matched which, with a genie alongside should not be a problem but since she’s the jealous type, it still is.

It’s about as daring as America’s own 1950s Doris Day or Cary Grant movies — though the genie and some dancing girls have thigh high slits in their flowing trousers.  There is plenty of slapstick and the famous Jerry Lewis leap into Dean Martin’s arms when the singer’s goof-ball partner sees the old man for the first time.  Wild over-acting, false bravado and scampering retreats are all part of the mix.   It’s mildly amusing still but more interesting as a musical and filmic history lesson of a little known land for those interested.

Another Henry Barakat production, this time featuring the widely appreciated Samia Gamal in the role of the fetching genie, Kahramana, and Farid al Atrache as the poor but genial singer, Asfour.  Compared to the much more serious Barakat films The Curlew’s Cry and There’s a Man in Our House,  just ten years later, [both reviewed at the links] Afrit is a fun bit of froth — especially if you want to see belly dancing by the experts, or hear the songs of a soulful Egyptian Bing Crosby….

There’s A Man in Our House — Egypt

We’re familiar enough with movies about daring resistance fighters in wars or to oppressive regimes –if they are French, Spanish, British, American, Norwegian, for example.  If Egyptian, not a clue.  Not a clue about much of Egypt after the Pyramids for most of us, unless it is that Napoleon brought his armies and archeologists there.  There is much more of a story to be told, of course, and many stories could be told to get at the larger one.

 

Henry Barakat’s 1961 A Man in Our House, tells one such story, very much in the European style.  Using the 1952 Free Officers led revolt against King Farouk as the context, a  brave young man hurls himself against the unjust government — Omar Sharif, as Ibrahim,  assassinates the Prime Minister– and has to go into hiding in the house of ambivalently supportive citizens.  His presence endangers the whole family, particularly since they are not as partisan as he is.  The father has to make difficult decisions about how much can be risked, and is pulled out of his a-political stance by his son and daughter, the maternal feelings of his wife for the young man, and her empathy with the likely worries of his mother.  There are several good scenes arguing and worrying over what being caught would imply.  And, despite the danger [or because of it?] Ibrahim falls in love with the daughter, who reciprocates and gets drawn into dangerous message carrying.  Love is always a problem for militancy, of course and he is pulled in the two directions of safety and sacrifice.  That’s the movie, in a nut-shell.  Contrary to the happy ending possibilities of such stories, Sharif decides his place is with the resistance fighters, and in a desperate attack on the Army Barracks manages to ignite the ammunition storage, destroying the base, and himself.

Filmed in black and white, with decent sub-titles and good story line it’s worth watching.  The relations in a “good middle class family” of Egypt of the 50s are on display.  The sense of fear for the young woman on the street by herself will grip everyone, and not just because of her role as a messenger.  Even though she could go out uncovered, in a conventional 1950s skirt, the fact that everyone else in the street and in the cars are men, makes us realize how precarious her situation is.  When Sharif masquerades as a taxi driver to be able to talk to her we are almost knocked off balance by the audacity:  this is not New York City of the same decade, where young women regularly went to work and took taxis.   Sharif, young and beautiful, is persuasive as a young militant — though his deference to the wishes of the father, and willingness to keep running, have an oddly obsequious note, probably only to western ears.

Barakat was an old hand in the Egyptian film business when he directed this, his 37th film.  The lighting, camera work, claustrophobia of the small house, the realistic sense of the dialog [of course we’re seeing a reduced version in the sub-titles] are all marks of this.  He was also the credited screen writer for some 18 movies, though this is not among them.  [His Curlew’s Cry was reviewed here a few weeks ago.]  The ad-hoc nature of the militants’ attacks will strike most of us as unrealistic, not something likely to topple entrenched power [he killed the Prime Minister without a safe house to go to?] Presumably, the film-time needed to be spent with the family, and their representation of other civilians in such times, rather than on the organizing prowess of the militias.    The pyrotechnics at the end however, will impress, even in black and white.

Recommended.

And, for added interest, the screen play [if not an entire novel, it’s unclear] was written by Abdel Qoddous, a well known opposition journalist of the era, and much called-upon screen writer.

Struggle on the Nile: Three Tough Guys and a Dame in Egypt

In Struggle on the Nile, a 1959 movie from the golden age of Egyptian cinema, you will encounter a young Omar Sharif as you’ve never imagined him — after witnessing the wonder of his stately good looks in Dr. Zhivago (1965), Lawrence of Arabia, (1962) and other movies of his Hollywood years.  Sharif was Egyptian of course.  Somehow though, we never think of him as Egyptian Egyptian — a young man, speaking Arabic and floating down the Nile with an older friend engaged to teach him how to be a man.  Yet that’s what we have in Struggle on the Nile.

Muhasab, [Sharif,] is a very young, very innocent — and very pretty — man, dizzily in love with the belle of Luxor village, Ward [no credits found], and is being sent off to Cairo by his recently blind father, to sell the last of the lateen sail feloukas of the village, “The Bride of the Nile,”  and buy a big motorized barge to compete with the other traders and boat owners along the river.  “The future is in steam and gasoline,” says one of the elders.  A long time friend of his father, Mujahed [ Rushdy Abazza] is to be the Chief of the boat. He is handed the sack of money collected by the village, much of it from selling their own boats and,  in a show of trust, and respect, gives the money to Muhasab for safe-keeping.

The scenes along the river and on the boats are filled with period detail — men handling rope, scampering up the mast, furling the large tri-corner sail.  The voices of the  old men in the village are filled with consternation over the coming changes —  “No one can defy time.” Read more of this post

A Citizen, A Detective & A Thief: Comic Relief in Egyptian Cinema

Up to this film I was prepared to believe Egyptian movies only dealt with serious matters in serious ways.  Adrift on the Nile, and The Curlew’s Cry, both in stark black and white, look at small groups of people and how they treat one another, some tenderly, some horrifically.  Both are undergirded by the question of sexual morality, freedom, class, the treatment of women by men.  As the credits roll, one reflects and thinks, but does not laugh.

That has changed with A Citizen, A Detective & A Thief, a 2001 madcap tale of these three fellows, and of course, the women in their lives — in the central case, the one woman in two lives.   It’s hard to slot this film in any well known space of western cinema.  By turns droll, silly, sad, and brutal, with long musical numbers thrown in, from a prison mess hall to a hip-and-belly churning wedding it too deals with class relations, corruption, the relations between the sexes and the social lubrication in a garrulous culture of “arrangement.”   There’s a lot to like in it, and a few things that could have used some editing.  Though, as the main story comes to a culmination and the director, Daoud Abdel Sayed, keeps going with an enormous long tail of more scenes to show several generations following the main characters, we continue to be tickled, even if only for the comic effect of speeding through so many important events.

The crux of the story is that The Citizen, a well education, monied and handsome young man, Selim [Khaled Abol Naga,] is in the throes of writing his first novel.  An old family friend, Fathi, The Detective, wonderfully played by Salah Abdallah, who arrives to help track down The Citizen’s stolen car, persuades him he needs a housemaid, being a bachelor and all.  The very tempting Hayat, [Hend Sabri] arrives.  Not only is she good looking, she is bright and tough, more than a match for the educated Selim.  She is also the girlfriend of The Thief, [Shabaan Abdel Rehim] who is in prison as the movie begins.  Rehim is, in real life, a popular singer and  he puts this to good use in the movie,  often singing a kind of Egyptian “corrido,” telling of the events of the day or week, how he feels and wants others to look on him, or what they are going through — a day in prison, for example.

Selim, though he has an upper class girlfriend is, naturally, attracted to Hayat and they find themsleves beneath the sheets — with a bit of his bare chest and her bare arms showing.  She has not yet been forthcoming about her other friend, and Selim is still blissfully unaware.  When she steals a few of his things, including the novel, the story gets really silly and rich.  It turns out that the Thief is extremely well read and fancies himself the literary critic.  In his opinion, Selim’s novel would be more useful keeping them warm. Into the fire it goes.  In the fight that follows, the Thief loses and eye, which being a singer, he sings about to help him through the pain….

Honest, it’s a funny movie to watch — except for a couple of more than slap-stick beatings administered to Hayat.  Upper class boy marries lower class girl; upper class girl is very content with the Thief – though they all regress to their original loves from time to time, with no hurt feelings, natch.  The constant  Thanks to God, It’s all in His hands, the praise heaped on each other, even trouble is intended,  and the wonderful hand gestures as arguments are advanced add to the enjoyment as we watch folks not too different from us act in ways that are different enough to set us up for some very engaged viewing.

The Nightingale’s Prayer – An Egyptian Movie Classic

The Egyptian classic, titled either The Curlew’s Cry or The Nightingale’s Prayer, depending on the translator, will not be for everyone. But director Henry Barakat was one of the grand old men of Egyptian cinema until his death in 1997. Faten Hamama was the most important leading lady in the Golden Age of cinema of the 1950s, and her co-star Ahmed Mazhar an Egyptian Cary Grant.   The story, based on Taha Hussein’s 1934 novel, The Prayer of the Curlew, of the scoundrel brought to goodness by the sweet, resolute young woman may be one of the favorite themes of literature around the world, second only to young, indomitable warrior stories.  Add to the transformation of the man, the lifting up of the poor girl to the life of wealth and true love and you’ve got  a winner.

In Hussein’s telling, and Barakat’s handling, we have two additional elements, not so common, at least in the European conception.  We first meet the family of three women — mother and two daughters– as they are forced by the mother’s brother to flee their village, after he has killed her husband, for adultery.   The absolute power of the dominant male in the family is understood more as history than as actuality for western audiences.  That it is not only his physical force that sends them out as beggars, but the women’s agreement — at least the mothers– that this must be so.

The two girls find work as maids in the city but soon after the oldest, Hanadi,  is seduced by her employer, the Engineer.  A charming and wealthy young man, he has little idea of the rural values she has come from.  Her uncle appears to remind her.  As with her father, the punishment for such a transgression, and shame, is death.  He is her judge and executioner.  Again, the mother seems to agree with the action.

Hamna, [Hamama] the younger sister,  however, is made of different stuff.   Brought up with traditional values, but now adapting to modernity and the city, she hold her uncle guilty for the killing, and the engineer for the dishonoring.  She arranges to become his maid with the intention of killing him — by poison, or any other means she might come upon.

Naturally, life plays its usual games.  The Engineer wants her.  She resists.  He wants her more.  She wants to kill him, but his declarations seem sincere.  She pours the poison and as he lifts the cup to his lips, seems to stumble and knock it out of his hands.  She is troubled be her feelings.  He is troubled by his.  In conversation with a prostitute girlfriend he begins to realize his true feelings.

When the uncle arrives, hot to avenge another dishonoring, this time of Amna, there is only one course left for  the Engineer – to sacrifice his life for his love.

The film, available from Netflix, [and strongly praised in the comments,] has been restored — of which there are some examples in the extra materials.  Even so it is sometimes very contrasty, and with odd light flares at transitions.  The scenes along the Nile are often too dark to be appreciated. Nevertheless, for international film buffs, or those with a particular interest in Egypt this is a must see film.

From The Arabic Film Blog, here is another review, in praise.   And here is one, which wishes it were something more.

Women’s Prison — Iran

Quite unlike any women-in-prison movie you might have seen, or contemplated seeing, Manijeh Hekmat’s 2002 Women’s Prison, from Iran offers no fetching blonds disrobing each other in cell block fights, or tough dyke guards leering at  nubile fems.  Far from it. The opening scenes take place in 1984,  in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war, and five years after the 1979 Islamic revolution. The female guards are all dressed from head to toe in  black chadors.  The prisoners, except for one, wear scarves but are otherwise dressed in layers of sweaters, jackets, ankle length pants.  They talk tough and foul, fight and smoke.

It’s a  difficult movie to watch with its grainy film stock, severe lighting and not very tight story telling.  Distinguishing between characters with only faces and vocal manerisms to help is sometimes difficult — especially when three key women are played by the same actor.  Some viewers will find themselves lost because of this, and not take in the whole movie.  Too bad. It’s a film and story you are unlikely to see elsewhere — women as they behave in a Muslim run prison as the culture changes around them.

It was ear-opening to hear the crimes some were in for — murder, prostitution– and the toughness displayed, even to a no-nonsense new warden, even with the threat of solitary confinement.  The language used — in subtitles, of course– was appropriate to our notions of prisons, with words like “rabid bitch,”  asshole,’ but leaves us wondering what the Iranian originals really are.  Is “bitch” a curse word there too?  Sexual dominance, and even rape, it seems are not just alive in the prisons of advanced western countries.  A wedding, complete with “birde” and “groom”  costumes, livens up the later part of the film.

As interesting as the traditional prison themes of toughness and rebellion are, the scenes of “domestic” life  — wash day, for example, with women treading on clothing in tubs of water, and hanging them out to dry, the care of children from infants to 8-9 years old — are equally so.

Alissa Simon at Senses of Cinema has a review much better informed about Women’s Prision than I am able to pull together, so I’ll just turn you over to her.

The in-depth research behind Women’s Prison generated one of its most chilling scenes—when the prisoners react to the death sentence passed on drug-addicted prostitute Mahin. Hekmat says soberly,

soon after the Revolution, the red light district in Tehran was totally demolished. Most of the prostitutes were living at that place and many of them were imprisoned, and some executed. The Revolution should have saved these women, but the authorities executed them. Since the executions were held very early in the mornings, we found that prisoners kept vigil through the night, staying awake with the woman who was to be executed.

Although Hekmat has been in the film business for 20 years (as producer, first assistant director and production manager), she faced many problems in making Women’s Prison. “As a first-time director, I had to get a particular permit from the Iranian Society of Film Directors and they denied granting such a permit, although I was qualified for the Society’s conditions.” Eventually, she obtained the permit in the name of her husband Jamshid Ahangarani (the film’s art director)

Senses of Cinema


Not a film for everyone, but those with an interest in women around the world, prison conditions or Mid-East cinema it’s definitely worth the time.

The Day I Became a Woman – A Film from Iran

What an unexpected, unusual and brain shaping movie. The Day I Became a Woman is Marzieh Makhmalbaf‘s first film in her native Iran,  as a director  though she also has screen writing and assistant director credits.  Her husband is Mohsen Makhmalbaf and a first rate director himself.

The outline of the film is simple.  Three parts, each with the name of the female protagonist and corresponding to three stages of an Iranian woman’s life: the transition from childhood to womanhood; the new requirement of marriage; old age, with its possibilities and transitions.  What is so marvelous is the way in which certain actions or objects take on  symbolic weight, plunging the stories much deeper into the lives of all Iranian women, probably all women of any partially modernizing middle eastern culture, and likely of all woman everywhere.  The economy of means with which Makhmalbaf does this is phenomenal.

“Hava” is the first, and title story:  it is the day when Hava, on her 9th birthday, ‘becomes a woman.’ She is, of course, 9 and wants to play with her play friend of years, Hassan, a young neighborhood (orphan) boy.  Her grandmother and mother will hear nothing of it.  She is becoming a woman.  They measure her for her chador and shoo Hassan away.  Finally Hava, hearing her mother say she was born at noon, shows her grandmother by the family clock that it is only 11 o’clock.  She has one more hour.  She is given a thin stick and shown how its shadow, when stuck into the sand,  will shorten as noon comes.  When the shadow disappears her time is up and she must “become a woman.”  She runs off with a large scarf held around her head.

The sweet, child conversations as the two plead with each other to play sets the innocent undertone.  Hava’s large eyes, and childish vigor, unafraid of arguing with her mother, unafraid of adventure give us an immediate impression.  Her careful monitoring of the shadow and repeating that her “time is almost up,”  is a powerful and simple image for her life, and what is about to happen.  When Hassan can’t play – he is locked in until his homework is finished– she takes his allowance and gets some tamarind and  candy.

“Let’s share it before I have to say goodbye.”

She passes a round lollypop between them, both grimacing at the sour taste. She goes to the shore and trades her scarf for a colorful floating duck.  The two boys who trade have made a rustic raft out of oil drums and a platform, onto which they attach the sail.  The image of the boys’ freedom setting out to sea (in a boyish way) set against the shortening shadow of her own happiness is enormously powerful.   We don’t know it yet, but the “boat” will reappear in the third section.  At noon, Hava returns to her house and we see her being taken away by her proud progentiors.

“Hide your hair, hide your hair, don’t sin!”

The second part is a long bicycle ride/race — all women, all young, all in black.  The wind billows into their chadors and impedes their progress but they pedal with determination.  The camera focuses on one woman in particular,  ‘Hoora,’ with full and repeated studies of her face, a mirror of her unwillingness to stop.  We imagine at first that it’s a race and  she wants to come in a the winner.  It soon becomes apparant there is much more going on.

Long, multiple tracking shots follow a dashing young prince on a galloping horse.  Once the beauty of it is established we see the rider is her husband who is very angry that she is riding a bicycle.  He calls to her, rides alongside her, begs her and threatens her to get off the bicycle.  She keeps riding.  He returns with an elderly imam and they both ride along side of her, threatening her with divorce.  She keeps riding.  They divorce her, still on horseback and then the village (male) elders arrive, all on horseback, gesturing and shouting.  She keeps riding.  It is one of the strangest sequences you are likely ever to see in a movie. And so effective sequence, portraying with minimal emotion her unyielding determination.  You will feel the oppression of her village/clan and want to scream, to get in the way of the horses, to throw sand at the riders.  Your own legs will tense as she keeps riding, riding.  Finally her two brothers are sent.  The force her off the bike.  As the camera pulls away, keeping up with young competitor of  Hoora’s, it is unclear what is happening.  Are they beating her?  Are they carrying her away?  Is she standing her ground?

The third sequence, perhaps the most fanciful, centers on an elderly woman who has come into a sizable inheritance.  She has bound colored ribbons on every finger to remind her of the things she want to buy.  She has a local boy push her in a wheel chair into a major shopping mall and begins to buy a refrigerator, a bed, chairs, a sofa, each in turn being pushed by another young boy on a loading cart.  Finally she takes them in a grand parade to the beach and has all the goods set up on the sand, as though it were her house.  There are other comings and goings that are both amusing and sad.  In the end she tells the boys to get all their little boats and load the goods onto them and take them out to the big ships standing off the shore.

The little boats she is talking about are variations on the oil drum boats of the first scene.  One is just big enough to put a refrigerator on, tied erect; it bobs  in the soft waves with the ships in the background.  They boys put “nene” on a big raft, sitting in a chair with an umbrella and her big double bed behind her.  The camera pulls back to a surrealistic vision of her finally acquired worldly good, bobbing precariously on the waves, apparently to go back to the ships on which they first came.

I swear to you, you will not forget this scene for a long time — nor the bicycle race or Hava pleading for Hassan to play.

Hava, of the first section, appears in her chador with her mother, looking at the old woman, seeing, we believe, the probable end of her own days.

This is quite an extraordinary movie, about women, in 2000 in Iran, but really about women everywhere, the clash of tradition against individual expression, about hope for something different, in its bare beginnings.

Baran: A Movie of Afghan Immigrants to Iran

Baran, another very fine movie from Iranian master Majid Majidi [see reviews of his Color of Paradise and The Song of the Sparrows ] informs us in his usual beautiful, well paced way of lives we know little or nothing at all, combined with emotions and relations we know bone deep.  Baran takes us to the Iranian border with Afghanistan where over 1 million refugees fled from the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and wars following wars following wars.  As everywhere, the plight of refugees is cruel.  Removed from their own countries, often from remote rural areas which once constituted their entire world, living in squalid, hastily put together camps without plumbing, electricity or the tools or sense of belonging to use them, they seek work where they find it, at wages below the prevailing native norm.

Much of Baran takes place on a building site where men build and destroy cinder-block and mortar walls in the most appalling safety conditions you can imagine.  I’ve been on Mexican building sites.  They are absolutely Inspection Ready compared to this one.  Many of the workers are Afghan refugees; all men and all illegal.  When one of them falls from the unguarded second floor and shatters his foot not only is his family in extreme difficulty but the building inspectors begin to descend on the Iranian contractor doing the work.

“Afghans!  Afghans run! the shout is taken up and half the workforce clears out — just as Migra raids in Southern California.

A work partner of the disabled Afghani brings his “son,” Rahmat to take his place, promising to watch over him.  The boy soon shows himself as too weak and clumsy to carry sacks of cement up and down make-shift stairways, or wield a sledge hammer.  He is swapped with a tall young Iranian boy, Lateef,  who had been doing the kitchen duties and resents his promotion to much harder work.  He begins to spy on and taunt Rahmat until he discovers what we have suspected from the beginning.  Rahmat is a young girl.

The wonderful central theme is Lateef’s increasing care for her, protecting her while trying to live within the customs of men and women apart, his own love-born shyness, and not wanting to jeopardize her work, and therefore nearness to him.  He goes to increasing lengths to help her, demanding his back wages from the brusque but kind hearted contractor, and selling his identity card on the black market.  Each time the money does not work as he intended.  He is as far as ever from her though eventually she recognizes him, and his intentions.

The ending is bitter sweet as the last gift of money doesn’t help the crippled father stay in Iran but to take the family back to Afghanistan.  The parting scene between the two is very compelling stuff.  The family is boarding a rickety pickup truck in the driving rain when the two finally exchange their recognition of love.  The best  best Cinderella moment I’ve ever seen in life or a movie takes place and then, water splashing into her footprint, the truck moves off.  She is gazing out through a netted niqab at him.  He is smiles at footprint and the water.  Water thrown at departing friends in Iran is a promise of return.

As is typical with Majidi the colors are saturated and rich.  Here, instead of flowers, and streams — though there is one river of particular and harrowing importance– he brings us into the construction site, with billowing gray dust, pouring rain, ruined barrels of steaming liquids, fires to heat the material, the slop of mortar.  It is very much a Dantesque scene, with great snow covered mountains in the background.  Steam coming from the workers mouths and nostrils, eagerly reaching semi-gloved fingers for the hot tea served all around.

I’ve never seen a movie so bound to workers lives as Baran; the constant, brutal physical labor, the fear of losing the job, the intimidating shouts and threats of the contractor.  Even away from this job site work is hard and dangerous.  Women, in full Afghan dress, pull stones and branches from a rushing river — again no safety equipment.  Them major theme of fierce sexual separation and how it is both “natural” and deformative runs the length of the movie.   The girl’s determination to break that wall as best she can to help her family; the Iranian suitor stepping outside his own walls to answer the mystery of his heart.

Our view of immigrants up against the larger culture, the disdain for them, their language and customs from the dominant one will ring familiar to all who pay attention to life here in the United States– but in the movie it is between people we would hardly have thought of in such a context.  And of course, we are reminded, mostly as background but also in one wrenching scene, of the war and the wars that continue to take lives of young people, and leave their families with gaping holes.

And through this, a  dawning love softens a crazy kid, puts him into his very best clothes to make an impression and drives him towards his loved one, despised immigrant or not.  This, he understands in the pouring rain,  is the love I will have in my life.

Every film of Majid Majidi’s is so wonderfully wrought I would go hours out of my way to see anything with his name on it, no title or plot needed, confident I would come away, once again, stirred by the shimmering colors of his human palate.