Visions of the Blind

By RICHARD CORLISS

There are people whose spirit is so gracious and capacious that it is a privilege to be in their company. Such a one is Mohammad, a blind Iranian boy played--no, inhabited--by Mohsen Ramezani in Majid Majidi's enthralling pastorale The Color of Paradise.

Mohammad attends a Teheran school for the blind and spends each summer with his sisters, his grandmother and his widower father. The boy not only loves nature, he seems blissfully wed to its sounds, scents and textures. He wants to catch the wind, learn the secrets of stones in a stream. A blind carpenter tells him that God is invisible, but that we can feel him in everything he created. The boy's life is an urgent quest to use his sensitive, educated hands to find these signs of God, these colors of paradise, on earth.

If Mohammad is blessed by this emotional acuity, he is also cursed by it--achingly aware, as any disabled child must be, of the things everyone else takes for granted but which he is forbidden. In the film's most passionate moment, this insightful boy cries out to God to explain why he is sightless. But the lad has even sterner tests in store.

So does his father, who is blind in other ways. For him, Mohammad is only a burden. He wants to get married again and fears that his fiance's family will not accept a blind child as part of the dowry. He exiles the boy, then retrieves him in a journey that sends them tumbling through violent rapids toward a fatal climax.

In the past decade, Iran has produced many lovely, probing films about children, but none so emotionally volcanic or full of convulsive incident. The Color of Paradise could be called the first Iranian action movie if it weren't so much more than that: artfully simple, beautifully observant of man and nature. This miniature epic is a film that, like its young hero, will enrich those who peer into its poignant heart.

--By Richard Corliss