Share
Majidi's Song of Sparrows Meanders Pleasingly
By Nicolas Rapold
Tuesday, March 31st 2009 at 2:28pm
Details:
Directed by Majid Majidi
Regent Releasing
Opens April 3, Lincoln Plaza
The direct appeals of his melodramatic groundswells have long made Oscar-nominated Iranian director Majid Majidi a dismissed old-school counterpart to Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi. His latest film observes ostrich-wrangling father Karim (Reza Naji) struggling to remain the man of the house as he weathers a series of bad breaks. There's an element of silent comedy not just in the mild humor or Karim's tapir-nosed grimaces, but in the simple (not simplistic) sentiment of the scenarios: the pursuit of an escaped bird across barren hills, the businessman in cluttered Tehran who plops on his motorbike and instantly turns into a cabbie. Beleaguered Karim, fond but suspicious of his kids, shifts between overreacting and lugging stuff like a pack animal, as the city opens up new opportunities for profit and ethical quandaries. But his perspective begins to feel a bit confined in Naji's hands, and it's a shock when Karim busts out a ditty about the world being a lie and a dream, after his young son's crew endures a setback to their get-rich-quick-through-goldfish scheme. The film is pleasingly meandering, till the more typically Majidian soulful and teary-eyed climax—for better or worse, nothing on the level of the once-blind professor's operatic reckoning in previous release Weeping Willow.
Recent Articles
More by Nicolas Rapold
Site Search «
Most Popular
-
The Strangest Landlord-Tenant Relationship In Town? Stacked up in cubicles for decades, immigrants living in a Bowery tenement may have a very unusual situation.
-
The Pet-Death Business All dogs go to heaven. Yours will probably get there in an urn.
- We've Bailed out the Banks. When Do We Go After the Crooks Behind our Financial Collapse?
- On Michael Jackson's Mercifully Goofy, Cheerful This Is It
-
The Secret Life of Girls On the latest blog-rock sensation's improbable, somewhat verifiable backstory
| buy, sell, trade 10,107 | musician 3,538 |
| rentals 12,927 | jobs 2,193 |
| adult entertainment 34,727 | |
| classifieds | backpage.com | Post ads for free! | |
|---|---|