By Heath McLeod
Hollywood love stories–with their buxom beauties, chiseled male counterparts, and horrendous scenarios–are far from Majid Majidi’s mind in his latest film.
While Baran takes on several aspects of a love story, it is far from your ordinary roll in the hay. The strangely familiar landscape and the unfamiliar working conditions create a captivating picture that Majidi shows through the relationship between Lateef and Baran, played by Hossein Abedini and Zahra Bahrami. While Lateef follows Baran, he is exposed to the burdens of the Afghan refugees, and his prejudicial mindset dissipates like a summer thundershower.
Majidi uses the weather in a manner that is unheard of in North American film; it exists as the personification of Lateef’s frustrated emotions. Thunder roars when Lateef discovers that Baran, whomhe previously treated cruelly because he believed she was an Afghan worker, is a beautiful woman. His attitude towards her quicklychanges; he dresses "like a pop-star" on the construction site in anattempt to get her attention, then walks home in the snow in utter failure.
The working conditions displayed in the film are abysmal, with characters paid a pittance to haul stones from a river in winter or warming by the heat of an oil-barrel fire, never sure if money will come from the employer. When someone loses the ability to work by losing a limb or an ID card, they have nothing left, unless they have family to support them. The contrast between North American life and the refugee life is stunning; Majidi puts an emphasis on the necessity of employment, and the refugees’ willingness to work.
Subtlety is Majidi’s greatest talent and he puts forth the working conditions in the guise of a love-story. Ample details pass by without much consequence, however if it had been a Hollywood production, the audience would be exposed to dialogues that kill the artistic quality of the film. Majidi doesn’t give anything away with unnecessary dialogues explaining the movie away into oblivion, but rather allows the silence and the setting to speak volumes of the hardships engaged by refugees in Iran.