The easier face of Iranian cinema gets an airing in this film about a blind boy and the tormented father who, incapable of caring for his son, wants only to chart a new road for himself. This isn't quite as calculated a crowd-pleaser as Majidi's earlier Children Of Heaven, although just about undoes the whole of that relative restraint in a fairly shameless, laughably sentimental (and ponderously foreshadowed) final image. The film has a certain pictorial finesse, and is never more engrossing than when aligned most closely with the child's point of view - evoking the vivid aural and tactile contours of his world. But when the film moves beyond that almost documentary-like core, it tends to find too-easy visual formulae and emotional evocations.
Review of The Color of Paradise
