The Color of Paradise

...In the clockwork universe a teacher at his school...

...Heisenberg's principle and tery of things...

...Can't you keep Color of Paradise, Iranian film- works with a meditative, visually poetic him...

...Hav- cannot free himself from it...

...While waiting for his fa- of cinematic experience that reminds you ther to simple villainy-we pity him for ther on a bench outside his special-needs why taking a break from American his loneliness, we sense his guilt conschool, the boy, Mohammad (Mohzen movies is so good for your health...

...ous ninety minutes of joy and sorrow For information about the Franciscan Friars and had already wonderfully pulled off: letSisters of the Atonement, contact: ting us see the hand of God at work in the ceaselessly active hands of a brave Vocation Director Grarmoor ~e blind boy...

...ghetto, at least here in Man- tum physics for metaphorical resonance, Majidi and his director of photogra- hattan, where laboratory- sometimes just in passing...

...dreadful temptations...

...Over- tions that fit easily into a Christian framesee revealed on the father's face isn't love whelmed by his responsibilities, includ- work...

...the tumbling rush of a brook...

...These opened in April and May, while the am- discussing the theatricality of the uncerbroad vistas alternate with close studies bitious Ensemble Studio Theater was tainty principle and corollary axioms...

...The British journal New Theatre with wildflowers, a line of trees atop a three new dramas about mathematics Quarterly has even run a series of articles hillside, swaying seas of alfalfa...

...Hashem's rejection of the boy is part visceral revulsion at vulnerability, but also A BLIND BOY WHO SEES a shamed and superstitious feeling that 'The Color of Paradise' as long as he has a handicapped son, he's going to be a loser...

...Does she want him to go get Mohammad...

...I'm worried about you...

...Steering father and son toward their and quantum mechanics...

...You can see him physicist Werner Heisenberg and his outlined by Newton and his followers, through your fingertips...

...but with no basis for acting other a man who views his son as a burden...

...Moreover, by attributing ty...

...is that what she is after...

...On Broad- quantum mechanics seems to provide a grandmother's lined face...

...Self-knowlabashedly at the deepest pathos, The Color ing set all his hopes on marrying the edge unredeemed by faith and love is of Paradise offers an evocation of child- daughter of a local wealthy man, he's des- worse than a tragedy, Majidi is saying, or r perhaps less than one: it's a nightmare, a I r 1 battle with demons that the demons will I win...

...The Color of steers the boy back, but by then we've fledgling to its nest alongside chirping Paradise turns to the countryside, nar- seen the father's darkest wishes revealed...

...Though he can't see the threads his grandmother and sisCommonweal 1 6 June 16, 2000 ters dip in boiling vats of wildflower dye, nimbly he sorts out the threads of the audible world: music and a warbling dove in Celia Wren a Tehran shop...

...We put man back sunglasses, and when his face puckers the reality," as Tom Stoppard explained at the center of the universe," Heiseninto a sob, it's heart-wrenching...

...Modern writers have been while some biomedical research demonspecifically imagined human story...

...I want to catch the wind," `Copenhagen' & 'The Real Thing' he says...

...The blind Mohammad, on the other hand, sees in brilliant tones of joy...

...We do, though, and what we farmer and charcoal burner...

...Heaven, chronicled Tehran's poor deep woods, and Hashem, pretending Then, still navigating by ear, he locates through the tale of a brother and sister not to notice, lets him go...

...And worry she should...

...He Majidi's lone previous film to be dis- ing scene at the charcoal-burning site, follows the sound, groping on hands and tributed in the United States, Children of Mohammad wanders off toward the knees through leaves to find the lost chick...

...uncertainty principle...

...aged mother, Hashem is headed toward than a raging sense of life's unfairness, he Rife with symbolism, taking aim un- middle age alone, and he's afraid...

...of Mohammad's hands, irrepressibly ex- wheeling through its second season de- To the thoughtful person, after all, ploring everything-plants, a stream, his voted to drama about science...

...I'm not worried about Mohammad," " she answers, quietly...

...Hashem, lost in his troubles, pays no attention...

...With his dark clothes and gloomy face, his cramped and smoldering emotions, Hashem resides spiritually in one of those charcoal-burning hovels where he toils his days away...

...God is not way, audiences were flocking to Michael welcome alternative to more determinvisible," he says, repeating the words of Frayn's Copenhagen, about the German istic science...

...one can (theoretically) calculate, and What's so winning about The Color of Heisenberg (1901-76) is not exactly a hence predict, everything...

...nous trip into the world of an eight-year- tain patience in a viewer...

...Riding a bus with his father, he reaches his hand out the THE IDEA'S THE THING open window...

...A co-worker the bird's tree, climbs up, and returns the and a lost pair of sneakers...

...This is the kind Majidi refrains from reducing the faold blind boy...

...Much modParadise is that it works both as spiritu- newcomer to the footlights, or to culture ern biology seems to rule out free will, al parable and as a richly detailed, in general...

...Afterward, exhausted but happy, rating a poignant family conflict centered and what's more, so has he...

...perately intent on putting his best self forward, and frantic to think that something might get in his way--including MohamRand Richards Cooper mad...

...Off Broadway, no fewer than hagen...

...Hashem recognizes the evil in or pride, but rather the grim weariness of ing caring for two little daughters and an himself...

...The work of Heisenberg and God, the beauties of a larger realm in- ally, really small), you can know either colleagues like Niels Bohr, by contrast, visible to us all-and yet the film never the position or the velocity of a particle, seems to argue for choice-for the mysloses its grasp on vivid human actuali- but not both...

...he lives in a world without color...

...In a quietly shocktiny bird in the woods behind him...

...The fascinated with the uncertainty princi- strates (it may appear) that our ideas religious meanings are there for the tak- ple, which states, roughly, that at quan- and feelings are chemically preproing-the blindness of a life without tum level (that is, where things get re- grammed...

...To me it with tradition seemed simply unnecessary, an attempt to deliver too literally a feat the previ- since 1898...

...The act of observing determines our own importance...

...he shouts at her, finally...

...The film an agonized selfishness...

...As Mohammad, Mohzen Ramezani, related quantum truths also imply that an uncanny meaning to human percephimself obviously blind, wears an over- by observing a particle, you interfere tion, quantum physics reassures us of sized grin and incongruous, movie-star with it...

...The theater produced now then again, a play touchSound of Music-style panoramas of the scene, in particular, has been awash in ing on some of the same issues as CopenIranian countryside: meadows brilliant theorems...

...Chicago-based S phy, Mohammad Davoodi, have filled minted ideas and images are playwright Penny Penniston recently The Color of Paradise with sumptuous, gaining ever wider currency...

...siblings...

...a cat's low yowl...

...in Hapgood, his 1988 spoof about spies berg boasts in Copenhagen...

...Who will marry a man with a blind son...

...It's cerning his son-but he's in the grip of Ramezani), hears the frantic squawk of a quiet and slow and utterly thrilling...

...When Hashem apprentices the boy to a tradesman in a distant town who I works with the blind, and his mother1 a piously religious woman-reproaches him, he rails against her God, a blast of despair and self-pity from which the mother recoils in dismay...

...In Frayn's no-nonsense drama of ideas, respective fates, The Color of Paradise pro- Stoppard and other authors, includ- such lines volley back and forth with all ceeds with the clarity and inevitability of fable, striking hardly a false note until the very end, when Majidi attempts a closing visual gesture sure to strike some "Experimenting as sentimental and intrusive...

...The thought knocks him here's a hauntingly beauti- hood reminiscent of Truffaut, or Lasse back again and again into the depths of ful scene at the start of The Hallstrom's My Life as a Dog...

...Mohammad doesn't realize that his fa- on Mohammad's widowed father, The Color of Paradise is an overtly relither has arrived to pick him up, and is Hashem (Hosein Mahjoob), a peasant gious movie, rich in spiritual implicawatching...

...but we understand perfectly the reality of Mohammad's life, with its cience has escaped from its ing Thomas Pynchon, have mined quannever-ending quest to grasp the invisible...

...he pleads with the director of the maker Majid Majidi's lumi- style that requires-and rewards-a cer- school in Tehran, as the boy waits outside...

...El PO Box 300 Garrison, NY 10524-0300 Rand Richards Cooper is the author of The 914 424 3671 Last to Go and Big as Life...

...Commonweal 1 7 June 16, 2000...