A Passionate Work of Empathy
It will break your heart
Rolling landscape. Vibrant colors. Mist clings to the forest base. Mystic clouds. Lakes. Water lilies. Ducks. Could have been taken from any Van Gogh painting. Sounds of nature. Chirping birds. Flowing streams. Frolicking children. Must be paradise.
Except for a poor boy who is trying to touch God with his fingertips. He feels everything by touching, his kindness makes him climb a tree to return a chick that fell from the nest. It must be the God in him doing this. So much kindness, so much passion, such an intense feel for nature, such a longing for love! All in a visually impaired boy of eight, whose widowed father considers him a burden.
The boy is in constant search of God. His teacher says, God is invisible but he can touch Him. That’s why he is trying to feel everything around him with his fingertips.
In the course of the film, the boy falls into a fast-running stream. His father, dumb-founded and at first not appearing to know what to do, hesitates for a moment, then jumps in. Both are swept away by the strong current, ending up ashore at a calmer part of the stream next to the Caspian Sea.
Dawn breaks. The father slowly gains consciousness, looks around, and finds the boy lying nearby. He limps, picks him up, embraces tightly, not willing to let go, whom he wanted to abandon. Weeps uncontrollably, feeling remorse for not having loved him enough.
One hand of the boy hangs from his father’s embrace. Close-up. Still. Suddenly, the first ray of the sun lightens it up. A flock of birds flies across the clear morning sky. The fingers start to move a little as if trying to touch something. Credits start to roll. Has he found God? Maybe.
This is The Color of Paradise (1999), a heart-wrenching work of master filmmaker Majid Majidi. Iranian cinema at its best.
