'Baran' -- simple, stunning refugee story

John Badalu, Contributor, Jakarta

Iranian cinema has been the flavor of choice for many prominent critics in recent years. And over the course of 10 years, Majid Majidi has established himself as one of Iran's most powerfully humanist filmmakers.

Dating back to his 1992 debut, Baduk (before which he worked as an actor), Majidi's career has been redefined by his astonishing visual approach to storytelling and the somber, but ultimately optimistic world view of the stories he tells. Baran (Rain) is also a film of some humor, tempering even its saddest moments with snatches of physical comedy that approach slapstick.

Majidi's latest film is no feel-good movie like his previous The Color Of Paradise and Children of Heaven. He takes the theme onto the next level of seriousness. No children play around but Baran focuses more on the serious topic on Afghan refugees in the shape of Rahmat.

There is no colorful cinematography but a cold, gray atmosphere (Majidi succeeds in showing the beauty of coldness and bitterness of life, through stunning pristine silver light, snow on the ground and a stray of weak sun low over the city). Majidi bemoans the poverty many Muslims face because of the civil wars caused by a foreign presence in their land.

Over the years, Iran has taken in well over a million refugees from Afghanistan. Although not officially assimilated into that society, they have become the mainstay of a black economy, exploited and appreciated in equal measure. Baran depicts a story at a building site where most of the construction workers are Iranians and Afghans. Every day, there is always tension between the two.

Latif, a young Iranian who works at the building site preparing food and groceries for all the laborers, suddenly has to switch jobs with Rahmat, a slightly built boy forced to work as a laborer to substitute for his father, who has had an accident. Latif bullies Rahmat all the time until one day he discovers Rahmat's secret. From that point on, Latif changes his attitude completely.

Majidi wanted to tone down his storytelling mood and come to a less explicit conclusion. If so, that doesn't happen. Even the most repressed dramas need to build to at least a slight release of tension, but Baran has no such scene, making you wonder if the last reel got mistakenly left out by the projectionist.

But if Baran isn't entirely satisfying, it's trying hard on so many other levels that the eventual disappointment is excusable. As a character, Rahmat remains a mystery throughout the film, but Latif is a superbly drawn portrait of a young man who discovers his own sense of self-worth through the act of assisting another.

The performance by Hossein Abedini is great; even though Latif's initial hostility to Rahmat is extreme, he allows you to see through the character's defensive exterior and warm up to him as he gradually changes his way of thinking.

"If people here can identify with what they see in my films," says Iranian director Majid Majidi, "it closes gaps".

Baran is not a super-complicated film, even by Iranian standards, but Majidi adorns the simple framework with flashes of lyrical beauty and compositional savvy. The cinematography -- which contains many long, fluid takes -- was accomplished with only one camera during the short location shoot.

On top of the superb cinematography by Mohammad Davudi, Ahmad Pezhman successfully creates the mood through his sublime music score. Even the audio department has done a very extraordinary job in presenting the audience with a highly crisp sound. Majidi's mastery of his craft enables such a simple story to capture your heart.