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Iranian Director Majidi Returns to "Paradise"
The New York Post, March 31, 2000

Another lovely film from Iranian director Majid Majidi, this story of a blind boy and his self-pitying father doesn't have the emotional heft of his "Children of Paradise," but it's still moving.

'Color of Paradise" is the latest film by Majid Majidi, the celebrated Iranian director of last year's wonderful "Children of Paradise."

His new work is set in the lush countryside of Northern Iran and tells a less conventional, more religiously symbolic story than the previous film.

It doesn't have the overwhelming emotional punch, political subtext or satisfying structure of "Children," but it's just as visually lovely, and it, too, affords a fascinating window into a society closed to
Americans.

The movie opens at a school for blind children in Tehran on the eve of the summer vacation. In the morning, all the parents come to pick up their kids, but 8-year-old Mohammad (Mohsen Ramezani) finds himself alone in the schoolyard waiting for his widowed father, Hashem, (Hossein Mahmub).

When Hashem finally turns up, he asks the teachers to take his son permanently. Shocked, they refuse, and Hashem brings Mohammad back to the verdant mountains of Northern Iran. Hashem is consumed with bitterness at the hand dealt him by life, and when it seems there's a chance he could marry a young woman from a strict religious family, he schemes to get rid of his son by apprenticing him to a blind carpenter.

Mohammad begins to adjust to a new life with the carpenter. But his father's selfishness and self-pity brings about disaster. Director Majidi is less fashionable with critics than some of his more academic and experimental Iranian contemporaries, because of the accessibility and what some would call the sentimentality of his films.

But he uses children to great effect, and in young, blind Mohsen Ramezani, Majidi has found another child actor with extraordinary screen presence.

He also does such a terrific job with a sequence on a whitewater river that you can't help wondering if he wouldn't make a fine director of action flicks if he were to come to the United States.

Running time: 90 minutes. Rated PG