Children of Heaven
Director: Majid Majidi. Cast: Mir Farrokh Hashemian, Bahare Seddiqi, Mohammed Amir Naji. Screenplay: Majid
Majidi.
That Majid Majidi's Children of Heaven has recently become Iran's first-ever Oscar nominee for Best
Foreign Language Film is both an inspiring and a dispiriting event. On the one hand, Iran has been
turning out a startling number of accomplished and striking films for the past decade, and the past five
years especially. To see the country recognized by the occasionally insular Academy is a cause for great
elation among those of us who have been swept up by the country's film output. Another reason to
appreciate Majidi's accomplishment is that Iranian censorship boards have traditionally been so strict
about sponsoring and releasing the work of Iran's filmmakers that any time that work reaches an
international audience feels like a feat in itself.
And yet, Children of Heaven is not the kind of picture that one imagines having trouble with even
the more Draconian censors who may have viewed it, and there lies the rub. Iranian films, or at least
those which we in America have been able to see, tend to fall in two categories. One is the slow, spare,
and contemplative drama typically realized by someone like Abbas Kiarostami, whose Taste of Cherry was a controversial Cannes co-winner in 1997 and my own
favorite film released in America in 1998. The other, more often represented genre is the fanciful,
child-driven pageant, most famously embodied in Jafar Panahi's The White Balloon and The
Mirror, or Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Gabbeh. Children of Heaven, which
follows a poor brother and sister's attempts to conceal the fact that they share a pair of sneakers,
clearly fits this second mold, and so it is beside the point to complain that neither Majidi's ideas nor
his expression of them bear any stamp of Kiarostamian profundity.
Unfortunately, the film also lacks the parti-colored dazzle and exuberant emotion of a picture like
Gabbeh, settling instead for a rote sentimentalism that is painless to watch but fails to excite.
Ali and Zahra, the siblings at the picture's center, are refreshing for being unlike those smug, moppety
Hollywood tykes who get by on cuteness alone. Only the hard of heart will not be smitten by these
fresh-faced little cuties, but when they shed tears, we are more inclined to feel their sadness
than to fawn over the precious little cheeks beneath the tears. I loved that little guy in Jerry Maguire as much as anyone, but a movie about him alone would have been
rather laborious to watch. Children of Heaven isn't. The issue of the lost slippers sounds
trivial until you realize what paralyzing fright exists for a child who knows he has been
irresponsible, whose only hope for avoiding punishment and disapproval is by recovering the object he
recognizes as hopelessly lost. Ali's self-consciousness when he realizes he has lost the shoes, Zahra's
shame at having to wear sneakers that are too large for her, and their afternoon appointments to switch
off the shoes—she has school in the morning, he during the day—reaches that level of energetic urgency
unique to children who think they are getting away with something.
As you can see, however, much of what appealed to about Children of Heaven was the degree to which
it avoided the pitfalls and conventions of other pictures about youngsters; my disappointment with Majidi
was that, despite knowing what not to do, he only seldom had original or involving notions of what
to put on screen. As the picture wears on (and it's much shorter than it feels), the family's
poverty and the grumbly tension between the parents feel less convincing and less consistent as backdrop.
We merely regard Ali and Zahra as they exchange shoes, try to sneak past school guards, admire how other
children are dressed, and then race off to meet one another again. The one major exception is a subplot in
which Ali accompanies his father (Mohammad Amir Naji) as they try to find employment as hired-out
gardeners for Teheran's rich. I liked watching the boy interact with his dad, but then Majidi ruins the
storyline with a maudlin bicycle accident that is not only wholly predictable but dishonestly filmed: the
huge, seasick dips and teeter-totters of the camera in a POV shot tracking down the hill fit not at all
with the shot of Ali, his father, and their bicycle, unstoppably but steadily speeding down the
incline. That's called cheating, Majid Majidi. (Sorry, I love that name.)
By the time we reach a climactic sequence in which Ali participates in a four-kilometer school race—the
prize he seeks is a new pair of sneakers—Majidi's film has made certain its interest in concocting
implausible or overly convenient events by which to extend its thinnish and soon-overspent story. The film
deserves points for concluding in a way different than you might expect, but again, that ending is to be
cherished only for bucking convention, not for being all that interesting or compelling in itself. The
nomination for Children of Heaven is like Al Pacino's win for Scent of a Woman or Lauren
Bacall's The Mirror Has Two Faces nod: Iran well deserves an Oscar, but not for this picture. The
opening shot of Children of Heaven is a close-up on the hands of a cobbler as he quickly and
carefully repairs a tear in Zahra's soon-to-be-lost pink slippers. It's a bold statement for a film to
make: introducing itself with a visual icon of craftsmanship and structural maintenance when the picture
itself is featherweight and shaky in construction. C