Baran: DVD & Movie Review (2001)

(Originally published 2001)

"In 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. By the time the Soviets withdrew 10 years later, the country had become a ghost of its former self. The devastation, combined with the ensuing civil war, the brutal reign of the Taliban regime, and a three-year drought, prompted millions of Afghans to flee their country.

"The United Nations estimates that Iran now hosts 1.5 million Afghan refugees. Most of the young generation was born in Iran, and has never been home."

And so begins Majid Majidi's powerful film "Baran," a leisurely told tale that isn’t nearly as bleak as its opening title card suggests.

That’s one of its surprises, but there are others. Set in northern Iran, the film focuses in part on the hardships suffered by the Afghan people pre-Sept. 11th but also on the bond that forms between Lateef (Hossein Abedini), a lazy young Iranian construction worker, and Rahmat, an Afghan boy whose father was hurt in a fall at the construction site and whose family’s survival now depends on him.

When Lateef, a tea boy at the construction site, loses his job to Rahmat, thus damning him to a more difficult life of hauling sacks of cement for a living, he bullies the boy.

But as the story builds to its core revelation—a secret that won’t be revealed here but which audiences will see coming long before Lateef—the film’s brooding mood lifts as Lateef’s world opens with unexpected possibilities, an infusion of hope and the prospect of love he finds in a mysterious Afghan girl named Baran (Zahra Bahrami).

Joining Mosen Makhmalbaf’s "Kandahar," this year’s other timely, must-see film set in the Middle East, "Baran" offers U.S. audiences an opportunity to reevaluate their opinions of the Irani and Afghan people by challenging how well they really know them. Are they so different from us? And if so, how different?

Based on Majidi’s own script, "Baran" begins with an aerial shot of the construction site before moving inside. There, everything seems to be smoldering, from the fires burning deep within the metal drums, which provide the only source of heat, to the people themselves, who are paid almost nothing for their work and whose faces reflect a desperation and a rage only matched by their fierce sense of pride.

As grim as the film sometimes is, "Baran" is hardly without humor. Sometimes it’s funny, particularly in the early scenes Lateef shares his with boss, Memar (Mohammad Reza Naji), and then later with Rahmat. It’s the film’s sharp, often mischievous sense of humor that will likely catch some off guard--especially since 13 months of news reports here in the States have suggested a light moment in the Middle East is as rare as a lasting sense of peace.

Grade: A-