Blogical Conclusion

LIFE, AS HE KNOWS IT

MAY 3, 2008 - THE WAY MAJID MAJIDI’S BARAN OPENS, it’s likely to strike terror in the hearts of the average audience, for the first thing we see is this text: “In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. By the time the Soviets withdrew 10 years later, the country had become a ghost of its former self. The devastation, combined with an ensuing civil war, the brutal reign of the Taliban regime, and a three-year drought, prompted millions of Afghans to flee their country. The United Nations estimates that Iran now hosts 1.5 million Afghan refugees. Most of the young generation was born in Iran, and has never been home.” The simple fact is that, however much we prime ourselves for overtly political stories – and that solemn, silent intonement does point to an overtly political story, the cinematic equivalent of spinach – they always remain something of a chore to get through. We know these films are good for us. We know they open our eyes to realities far beyond our shores. And yet…

But the welcome surprise of Baran is that it isn’t about matters of the state so much as murmurs of the heart. It’s about people; the politics merely adds an extra dimension to these people. In another film, when construction worker Najaf (Gholam Ali Bakhshi) falls from the second floor of his work site and breaks his leg, and when he’s forced to send his young son Rahmat (Zahra Bahrami) to fill in for him, you’d say it’s because he’s poor and he’s got all those mouths at home to feed. But here, you say it’s also because he’s an Afghan refugee in Iran who’s getting paid far less than his Iranian counterparts, so if he doesn’t send Rahmat to take his place, he’ll lose even the miniscule amounts of money he’s making, besides not knowing if there’s going to be any employment available once his leg heals (dependent as that is on hard-to-get authorisation cards).

But Najaf doesn’t break that leg till about five minutes into the film, and until then, we’re free to savour how much easier Iranians like Lateef (Hossein Abedini) have it. He waits outside an eatery where the cooks inside are kneading dough and making small balls and flattening them into roti-shapes and laying them out on a conveyor griddle, where the heat causes them to erupt into sickly boils that then turn brown, then black, and now look merely delicious. Lateef counts the pieces of bread, folds them into a shoulder bag, grabs one for the road and sets out for the construction side, where his job is to feed the other workers. He also has to brew for them frequent glasses of tea, but all told, life couldn’t be better given the circumstances, considering the alternative is to sunder walls and shoulder heavy bags of cement.

The lightness of Lateef’s being – of his job, of his life – is unobtrusively laid out as he dawdles back to the site, stopping to laugh at a couple playing catch with a hat, smiling at his reflection in the doorway of an expensive-looking building. He passes a couple of men engrossed in a game of chess. He sights a coin on a road strewn with dead leaves. He looks around, places a foot on it, squats as if to tie his shoelaces, and pockets the coin. He enters a grocery store and shops for the other workers – pasta and Harvardin cigarettes – and while totalling the purchases, he impulsively grabs a lollipop and sticks it in his mouth. And when – his hands heavy, his tongue sweetened – he arrives at his destination, he finds a crowd milling around the injured Najaf. Lateef doesn’t know it yet, but that accident will change his life. He will no longer be the man-boy who smiled into a glass door and delighted in the casual, roadside games of an anonymous couple. But now, as he’s still leading his life as he knows it, he can afford to look at Najaf and smirk to a neighbour, “He jumped without his parachute?”

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