Customer Reviews

Baran [VHS]

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Majid Majidi, director of "The Children of Heaven" (first Oscar-nominated film from Iran), gives us another heart-warming (and slightly poignant) film about "Baran" (meaning "Rain"). The film has a romantic taste in a subdued narrative, and perhaps a very immediate and political message. But like a lovable brother and sister in "Heaven," "Baran" is about the two people in Iran tenderly depicted by Majidi.

The story starts with a young man Lateef working at a construction site somewhere in Iran. The work is hard, and many workers are actually not Iranian, but illegal immigirants from Afghanistan. The boss Memar (excellent Mohammad Amir Naji, father of the children in "Heaven") is in fact a good fellow, but doesn't (or cannot) give much wage to them. There, Lateef has been assigned a rather easy job, serving tea and bread because of his father.

But one day Lateef must start to work, this time a real one. For one of the workers of the place broke his leg, and a son of the injured, very small boy named Rahmat, replaces this guy who could be lazy until then. Sulky, discontent, Rahmat acts very nastily before this small boy ... until he finds a surprising secret about "Rahmat" who in fact is named "Baran."

The rest of the story should remain untold. The man begins to change his attitudes to this newcomer, silently protecting Baran and keeping the secret from the people around them. But what can he do? And how far can he go when he knows someday Baran and the family must go back to the country where the society is still very unstable? All those emotional changes happening in this man's heart are tactly dealt with Majidi's lyrical narrative, without being too sugary and sentimental.

I understand some people's complaint that this film (and Iranian films in general) is too slow-moving. And I think the latter half, which should have shown more of Baran, seems a bit overlong. The 90 minutes surely feel long even for me (though I have watched many films from that country). Still, the charms of the simple tale with rich details of the everyday life in Iran which the Western media rarely cover are irresitible.

Certainly it moves slow, but "Baran" presents us what a good cinema can do with its good visuals and sincere attitudes towards filmmaking and the people it pictures.

Those who are interested in Iran-Afghanistan relations should see "Kandahar" and "The Cyclist." The former in a sense follows the possible life of Baran, and the latter is a big hit in Iran about a most desperate bet done by an aged illegal immigrant from Afghanistan, who has to ride a bicycle through one whole week.

Filmed before the tragic events of September 11, and yet as timely as today's headlines, this Iranian film captures the plight of Afghan refuges in Teheran. There are more than 1.4 million of them who fled the Russian invasion in 1979. Many have grown up never seeing their homeland and, like illegal aliens everywhere, work the hardest for the lowest pay. And yet, this is a love story.

The scene is a skeletal construction site where workers are putting bricks in the frame of a large building. Shot from a distance, the people look like worker bees. But they soon become individuals as the director moves the camera towards them. Work is hard, dusty, backbreaking and dangerous. And there are both Iranians and illegal Afghans working there. The owner, played by Mohammad Amir Naji, is always screaming "get back to work" but we soon find out that his bark is worse than his bite. He's under pressure to get the job done right or he won't be paid, and he also has a warm place in his heart for the hard-working Afghans who must run and hide whenever the inspectors come around.

Lateef, played by Hossein Abedini, is a 17-year old Turkish Iranian and so therefore has a precious identity card. His job is the cook and "tea boy" on the site. He's full of ego and loves to joke around, often getting into arguments and scuffles. One day, one of the Iranian workers gets injured and, in order to feed his family, sends Rahmat, in his place. Rahmat is small and delicate and cannot carry the heavy bags of cement and so therefore is assigned Lateef's job. Lateef is at first furious and is especially angry when Rahmat's cooking is praised by all the workers. Later events make him change his attitude though.

It is interesting that throughout the entire film, Rahmat doesn't speak one single word. However, the audience doesn't miss anything as every possible emotion comes through with just expressions and gestures. The story is a rich emotional experience against a background of harsh reality. The cinematography and direction are excellent. I could feel the strain of muscles doing heavy work. I saw the beauty of the natural countryside, and felt the horror of never having an identity card. I shuddered at the image of a cold stream, which would be beautiful except that women laborers, cold and overworked, were eking out a living by moving boulders. This is the story of extreme struggle. And yet, it is the love story that shines through.

After two masterpieces, Children of Heaven and Children of Paradise, Majidi does it again, and creates yet another masterpiece with Baran. He is one of the most talented directors in any language or era, as he uses a cinematic language that on one hand reminds me a lot of the european greats like Bergman, Truffaut and DeSica.., yet on the other is a reflection of his culture and environment.
The love and infatuation that the teenager Hossein feels for Baran is simple, innocent, and well..doomed. It had to be from the start..An Afghan refugee working on a building site to support her family after her father has an accident,concealing her identity as a result, and a working class and poor Iranian boy, who at the beginning of the film was the irresponsible joker, and whose life is totally transformed by his 'discovery' and love.
The genuis of Majidi, is that he films this story without sentimentality yet with great compassion and love for his characters,and with a camera work that is pure poetry.
There are many unforgettable scenes in Baran, but the one that haunted me the most was when Baran's secret is discovered by Hossein. The acting is great from the amateur leads, especially Baran who doesn't say a word in the whole film, but whose face speaks volume, acting worthy of top rewards!!
Iranian cinema in general and Majidi in particular have proven that cinema is a truly universal art, like music, it brings people together regardless of their cultures or faiths, like no other art form can.
Baran is a must buy for any cinema lover, a film full of colour, soul and dignity.

This is not really a story about the plight of Afghan refugees in Iran. That makes it sound as earnest and boring as a report from a parliamentary committee or a term paper from a sociology student. This is a love story, and one of extraordinary power and depth. It examines the lives of a man and a woman, both living on the margins of their society. They never exchange so much as a word or a touch, let alone body fluids, but love transforms them both. Eros and Agape both triumph in this marvellously shot and understated film.

This is a low-key but affecting story about a young man learning to love.

Seventeen-year-old Latif works at a construction site for a friend of his father. He's all hormones and bumptiousness, quick to laugh, and quick to pick fights with the older workers who toss jibes at him. Many of his co-workers are Afghani immigrants who have left their war-torn country looking for a better life. Latif is in charge of the kitchen, preparing meals and serving tea to the workers. When one of the Afghani workers falls out a window and breaks his ankle, he sends his son Rahmat to take his place, since the family desperately needs the money. This boy isn't strong enough for heavy labor, so the foreman puts him in the kitchen in place of Latif.

Enraged, Latif loses no opportunity to torment Rahmat, until the day he sees the lad furtively combing out his long, black hair and realizes Rahmat is a girl, a beautiful one at that. Latif goes from bitter to smitten, and takes to protecting Rahmat from the other workers. He even risks jail to keep her from being picked up by the Immigration officers. When the foreman is forced to lay off the Afghani workers, Latif's new love disappears back into her country neighborhood. Latif uses all his spare time to find her, and all his money to help her dirt-poor family. Through all of this, he never actually talks to Rahmat, or spends any time with her. Loving her though, transforms him from a callow youth into a compassionate, even noble, young man.

Baran presents a type of love we in western societies don't usually experience. Latif's behavior towards Rahmat is fervent, self-sacrificing, and abstract. The idea of his love for her seems to drive him more than the prospect of actually interacting with her. Part of this is surely cultural. At the movie's end, just when it seems that they're about to talk, she throws a buhrka over her head and turns away to her father's truck. Latif is left with a hair pin she dropped and the image of her footprint in the mud, soon washed away by heavy rains. You can imagine how this intense, abstract emotion could be transformed in young men into a willingness to die for the abstract idea of a perpetual afterlife.

Hossein Abedini gives an energetic but emotionally shaded performance as Latif. Actress Zahra Bahrami doesn't speak one word for the entire movie, but conveys all of Rahmat's feelings and yearnings through her lustrous black eyes. Director Magid Majidi does a great job conveying the dust and sweat of hard labor - there's a particularly wrenching scene where Rahmat and other women find work lifting heavy boulders out of a cold stream. Without romanticizing, he also shows us the bonds that form among poor working men.

I've also seen Majidi's film Children of Heaven, about a brother and sister in a poor neighborhood in Tehran, and would recommend it highly.

this film is a great watch! something in this would apply to everyone.
the movie is full of subtleties that you almost have to watch it carefully several times, to pick up on all the great moments and appreciate them. the girl in the film who is one of the main characters does a great job of showing the suffering and efforts of refugees, women in a society dominated by men, and children living in poor conditions. she doesnt speak once throughout the entire film, yet her story is clear, and you feel she has told you her entire life history.
the movie highlights the forgotton, or ignored plight of afghans living as refugees. this particular film shows the situation as it took place in iran, where many afghans fled following the soviet invasion.
i recommend this to all. the film is in farsi with subtitles, but this doesnt make it a film that only applies to a foreign audience who understands the original dialect, this will touch you.

This is my favorite of Majidi's movies. It combines the sweetness and gentleness of his Children of Heaven (1987)with an objective look at lower and lower middle class Iranian society, and the impact of the infusion of immigrant Afghani workers into that mix. It also shows, and this is probably going to be lost on the most Western viewers (it certainly was for me until I visited Majidi's website), some of the underlying tensions between Iranians of different backgrounds. Among the groups represented are Kurds, Azeris, and Lurs.
One of the things that makes this film so touching is how the main character, Lateef, is transformed from a shirking, irresponsible and selfish young boy into a man through his love and sympathy for a young Afghani refugee, Baran. Although it may sound unusual that this love affair develops with perhaps no more than five or six words spoken between Baran and Lateef, what happens on screen seems completely understandable and convincing.
There is one extremely powerful and startling image that Majidi uses towards the end of the movie that represents the untranscendable social division between the two. That is the snapping of Baran's burkha over her head as she and Lateef part for the last time. Never has that particular symbol seemed so intrusive and unfair in a film to me before. This time it was not for any political or religious reasons. Rather it was especially cruel because it divided Baran from Lateef permanently.

Majid Majidi, director of "The Children of Heaven" (first Oscar-nominated film from Iran), gives us another heart-warming (and slightly poignant) film about "Baran" (meaning "Rain"). The film has a romantic taste in a subdued narrative, and perhaps a very immediate and political message. But like a lovable brother and sister in "Heaven," "Baran" is about the two people in Iran tenderly depicted by Majidi.

The story starts with a young man Lateef working at a construction site somewhere in Iran. The work is hard, and many workers are actually not Iranian, but illegal immigirants from Afghanistan. The boss Memar (excellent Mohammad Amir Naji, father of the children in "Heaven") is in fact a good fellow, but doesn't (or cannot) give much wage to them. There, Lateef has been assigned a rather easy job, serving tea and bread because of his father.

But one day Lateef must start to work, this time a real one. For one of the workers of the place broke his leg, and a son of the injured, very small boy named Rahmat, replaces this guy who could be lazy until then. Sulky, discontent, Rahmat acts very nastily before this small boy ... until he finds a surprising secret about "Rahmat" who in fact is named "Baran."

The rest of the story should remain untold. The man begins to change his attitudes to this newcomer, silently protecting Baran and keeping the secret from the people around them. But what can he do? And how far can he go when he knows someday Baran and the family must go back to the country where the society is still very unstable? All those emotional changes happening in this man's heart are tactly dealt with Majidi's lyrical narrative, without being too sugary and sentimental.

I understand some people's complaint that this film (and Iranian films in general) is too slow-moving. And I think the latter half, which should have shown more of Baran, seems a bit overlong. The 90 minutes surely feel long even for me (though I have watched many films from that country). Still, the charms of the simple tale with rich details of the everyday life in Iran which the Western media rarely cover are irresitible.

Certainly it moves slow, but "Baran" presents us what a good cinema can do with its good visuals and sincere attitudes towards filmmaking and the people it pictures.

Those who are interested in Iran-Afghanistan relations should see "Kandahar" and "The Cyclist." The former in a sense follows the possible life of Baran, and the latter is a big hit in Iran about a most desperate bet done by an aged illegal immigrant from Afghanistan, who has to ride a bicycle through one whole week.

It's a pretty simple story about a Iranian boy's developing affections for a Afghan refugee girl. The situation is complicated by her masquerading as a boy to earn some desperately needed money for her family.

Although it deals with youong love, this movie is by no means a fairy tale, which is the fate of almost all Hollywood movies telling similar stories. The characters may dream and yearn, but reality is always pressing and uncompromising. But the movie also offer hope. Perhaps in the end, life is not about the gratification of our desires, but how we reached out to others.

This is a gently heartbreaking film set in Tehran, a city flooded with Afghan refugees during the time of Taliban rule in their homeland. It touches on several themes, including the plight of the refugees, and those of them who work illegally as laborers in the construction industry. Much of the story takes place at a construction site, where the central character, a young Iranian, a short-tempered lad full of complaints about his lowly status among the other workmen, gradually discovers within himself a heartfelt compassion for the refugees in the person of a girl masquerading as a boy to support the family of her disabled father, injured at the work site.

The young man's compassion is ignited by the love he begins to feel for this girl, and there begins a series of selfless sacrifices that he makes for her and her family. Though they never exchange a word in the film, she leaves a deep impression on him, and he is utterly changed by his experience. A story that is about the transformation of character, the film sometimes struggles to externalize this process, often observing the main character as he watches from the sidelines, wordlessly ponders his situation, or goes in search of the girl and her family. Director Magid Magidi compensates in part by revealing the working conditions of the men, the difficulties of the contractor in charge of them, and the unforgiving weather (snow, rain, cold) in which they all labor. Recommended for the window it opens into a world rarely revealed by the cinema or the news media.