By PETER CALDER
(Herald rating: * * * * )
With films like The Key, The Jar and The White Balloon, Iranian cinema has established a rich recent tradition of movies that depict the world of childhood with keen accuracy.
This 1999 production takes that a step further, evoking the world of a
blind child in a classic and moving story.
Eight-year-old Muhammad (Ramezani's artless performance is the film's standout) is adored by his sisters and grandmother (Feiza).
However, he is regarded as a burden by his widowed father (Mahjub) who is courting a new, young bride.
Dad farms the boy out as apprentice to a blind carpenter but neither gets what he expects from the new arrangement.
There's a wonderfully tactile quality to the film's early sequences (the scenes in a school for the blind, as the kids take down dictation in Braille, feel like a documentary) and some of the scenes of village life - plastering and whitewashing a house, making dyes from flowers - verge on ethnography.
And the narrative, ravishingly filmed, unfolds with an almost austere economy.
Only a rather banal and obvious ending which, one suspects, doesn't travel well outside the Islamic world, undermines the effectiveness of a simple tale well told.
Cast: Mohsen Ramezani, Hossein Mahjub, Salime Feiza
Director: Majid Majidi
Rating: PG
Running time: 90 mins
Screening: Lido
* The Colour of Paradise is also out on rental video.
