It's an unusual way to watch a movie, but why not? I meditated during the screening of Majid Majidi's "The Song of Sparrows": breathing in and clearing the mind as I watched splendid images of the Iranian landscape rise to the screen and then subside, like moments in a kaleidoscope. A sliver of butter falls into the colorful lap of a man's wife, and the camera rests on it lovingly, blonde-white in the sunlight. Then we have a broken ostrich egg, with ants crawling out of the seeping yellow yolk, a man walking through the streets with a peacock blue door diagonal in his arms, a school of red-orange squiggling goldfish spilling like live jewels onto a sidewalk, one doing a suicidal dance before flip-flopping into the canal below.
The story? It didn't seem to matter: a man, Karim, is fired from his job at an ostrich farm, and then, for the rest of the film, tries to make ends meet in a series of odd jobs, to support his children. The film traces his energetic anxious steps in a peripatetic journey reminiscent of neorealist films such as "A Bicycle Thief". Karim becomes a taxi-moped in the big city for Iranian businessmen with cell-phones, some of whom don't want to pay. He delivers flowers, the children of his extended family joining in joyfully to help. More amazing images: the children running through the flower-beds like a chorus line, with red flowers bright over their heads.
Director Majid Majidi, best known for his earlier film "The Children of Heaven" (1997, contender for an Academy Award), was a mild elder man in a blue-red gentlemanly sweater, with a worn look like a comfortable chair in a family living room. We met in a private salon of the Berlinale, under the bright white lights of a film crew: Majidi, I and an eager Polish journalist, as well as a jolly translator. The interview had the ease and pleasure of one of the shots of his film. My question about what inspired the story transmitted through the translator, resulted in a low-pitched gentle Persian monologue, which came back through the translator as a compassionate monologue on humanity:
"My story began with the human being: what are human values, the transcendental values? There is no limit to getting in touch with these transcendental values. To be kind, a good person. God created us as pure creatures. This purity lives inside us. Big cities kill these values. Modernity kills these values. Human beings are more lonely. I'm losing my time everyday."
"So am I," I noted.
Majidi is also famous for his love of children: his films show them as the creatures of God, full of innocent joy in their faces---a trademark that for some works well, and for others is too sweet, detracting from the stark realities of real social problems in Iran.
"Real social problems?" Majidi noted, with a shrug. "The main point is to tell the story of human beings. I did not want to get into the social problems of my country."
As for the title of his film, Majidi noted that birds are a metaphor for a kind of beauty.
And the ostrich? The film begins with a panorama of ostriches in the rolling hills of Iran--that majestic landscape already famous to us from Abbas Kiarostami's films.
Majidi grinned happily. "Ah the ostrich! The ostrich is our human destiny. They are silly animals, always running away. And they are the only bird who can't fly."
An ostrich dance closes the film: the head silver, turning in a mass of fluttering brown-black feathers, with a divine white fringe. It is a prolonged moment of bliss.
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