nwasianweekly.com
Jan. 26 , 2008

Image provided by Cine Majid

Parvis Parastui, as Youssef, tries to come to terms with sight after decades of blindness.

The gift (curse?) of sight

By Andrew Hamlin
Northwest Asian Weekly

Youssef (Parvis Parastui) starts “The Willow Tree” in the midst of life, playing with his young daughter, checking in with his wife (Roya Taymourian) about the house, pushing keys on his Braille typewriter to produce heavy squelched embossings on each sheet of paper. His wife collates his papers for his desk, and in the first of several melodramatic set pieces, gathers them back after they blow away in a windstorm. Blinded at age 7 in an accident, Youssef nevertheless teaches literature in Iran and studies the life and work of Rumi, especially the poet’s transformation of heart after meeting the dervish Shams-e-Tabrizi. Rumi lost his remarkable friend after knowing him less than a month, quite possibly to murder, and that loss extruded epochal song from Rumi’s soul. Youssef does not know it at the film’s beginning, but he too is about to lose something he holds precious.

A trip to France for investigation of an eyeball tumor turns up a cure for that tumor — and something else, unexpectedly. The doctor believes he can restore Youssef’s sight. The operation succeeds. But Youssef doesn’t understand that he is not the same man who went under the knife. His newfound vision is confusing at first, as he tears off his bandages, quite against doctor’s orders, and experiences an ordinary hospital corridor, in the dead of night, as a vast tunnel shunt. He approaches his own reflection in a glass door, finding it as wavery and watery as his own sense of self.

Director Majid Majidi doesn’t rank among the strongest or most stylistically trailblazing of Iranian filmmakers. He uses original music pretty much the same way Hollywood directors use it, to slather significance over points and emotions better left spare and simple. His thematic arcs don’t require a crystal ball: If Youssef quits reading Rumi’s poetry, and more transgressively, quits talking to God, his apostasy and abandonment of mysticism must eventually demand a toll.

Youssef doesn’t abandon passion; instead, free to act without support from his wife or friends, he finds passion a tempting trap. He loves a woman who is not his wife. Blind, he might never have given her a second thought. Given free rein, he falls into temptation.

Majidi concentrates on one effect from which everything worthwhile in the film blooms: the majesty of the new life granted by new sight (whatever its attendant pitfalls). As Youssef sweats in the hospital, a perfectly square window perfectly framing a perfectly green garden scene sits to one side of the bed. A Garden of Eden — minus, temporarily, the snake — for future contemplation. Later, agitated, he’ll march down a narrow corridor centered onscreen, leaving that greenery for cold walls of concrete gray.

Youssef’s falling out with his God, and his eventual, necessitated attempts at reconciliation, seem predictable, not to mention suitable, for mass consumption by the mostly devout Iranian home audience. But in color, framing and spacing, the film finds the transcendence it needs. Pay attention, it whispers. Pay attention to a rainy night, city lights haloed beyond the window. Pay attention to the sun through the forest. Pay attention, because what you see, what you experience, whatever it may be, is something someone else cannot have.

“The Willow Tree” ultimately punishes wishing, while teaching us to start with what we have and to look deeper into ourselves with that.

“The Willow Tree” opens Jan. 25 at the Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle. For showtimes, call 206-781-5755.

Andrew Hamlin can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.

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