User Reviews

Iranian director Majid Majidi is known for sweet and often sentimental films that contrast with the more acerbic films of his countrymen Jafar Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami. Though no Iranian film has made much headway at the box office in the U.S., films such as Majidi's Color of Paradise have found their audience on DVD and he has received numerous awards, including an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film for Children of Heaven. His latest film, The Song of Sparrows, which appeared at several film festivals last year, has now opened in limited release in New York and Los Angeles and it carries on in the same tradition of simplicity, warmth, and a substantial dollop of sentimentality.

Reza Naji, who portrayed the blind boy's father in The Color of Paradise, is Karim, a poor man who works on an ostrich farm in rural Iran. Karim, a devoted husband and father of three, loses his job when one of his birds, a symbol of nature, wanders into the hills. Though he chases after the bird, putting on an ostrich costume in a comic attempt to capture the bird, it is to no avail. Compounding his misfortune, his oldest daughter Haniyeh ((Shabnam Aklaghi) drops her hearing aid into the water-storage tank so that it now requires expensive repairs, money that the family does not have. Traveling to Tehran to try to fix the hearing aid, Karim inadvertently finds that people, some with considerable means, mistake his motorbike for a taxi, giving him a new and lucrative line of work as a cabbie.

Clearly visible, however, is the contrast between Karim's wealthy customers and the poor beggars who wait at the side of the road and the job exposes him to the seamier side of big city life and the ugly grey face of crowded Tehran. As a taxi driver, Karim is bilked out of his fare, threatened with reprisals if he does not find another spot to wait for customers, listens to men shouting at each other on their cell phones, and gradually succumbs to the allure of accumulation. Every night he brings home another piece of useless junk that he finds on his route and they begin to pile up in his backyard.

Slowly he begins to lose his generous and honest nature and even his children become corrupted. His youngest son Hussein (Hamed Aghazi) makes plans to become a millionaire by cleaning out a sludge-filled pit and using it to breed and sell goldfish, unaware of what is involved. When the fish are accidentally lost, the boys are overcome with grief but Karim, who has been forced into self reflection by an accident, reminds them that "the world is a dream and a lie," forecasting the family's return to sanity and joy, exemplified by an exquisite ostrich dance that brings a note of light-hearted grace.

Majid Majidi's favorite man,Reza Naji who played the construction overseer Memar in Baran (2001),the father of the blind boy Ali in Bacheha-Ye aseman (1997),and Mortaza the hospital mate of Youssef (Parviz Parastui)in Beed-e majnoon (2005)plays Karim this time. Karim works in an ostrich farm.He doesn't make much but he seems to be contented with what he has with his simple family. One day he gets the ax when one of the ostriches runs away.On his way back home, he finds out that her daughter has dropped her hearing aid in the sludge of the local storage. Soon after, he travels to Tehran to have the hearing aid fixed.When he is mistaken for a cabbie with his motorbike he starts making his living in Tehran.Through heavy traffic he carries goods like- even-a refrigerator and many sorts of people.Through the bustling city life we witness Karim's sustained efforts trying to preserve his unadulterated self. Karim,even as an understanding husband and father is still part of a patriarchal society. He believes in his own truth. For instance, one day when he is coming back from the city,he sees his kids selling flowers on the roadside and the first reaction he gives is:" Don't I provide for you enough?" However the only dream his son Hussein (Hamed Aghazi), has is to clean up the storage,buy some fish to let them reproduce there and to become a millionaire by selling more and more fish:)No matter how brusque he looks like Karim is a good-hearted guy like any other major Majidi character. Deeply and genuinely concerned with faith,bad men don't seem to be taking much of a space in Majidi's movies. Unlike other Iranian directors like Abbas Kiarostami he seems to have undertaken a mission of creating simple but sweet movies. Last but not least,IMDb's language information may sometimes be not fully correct. Majidi uses more and more the Turkish language in his movies. Song of Sparrows include more Turkish words than his previous movies maybe because of the fact that Karim and the local people around him speak a Persian mixed with Azerbaijani Turkish. The song Karim sings at the back of the truck and the song he sings to his wife are in Turkish. The songs to which they listen on the truck's tape recorder are also in Turkish. It may be just me but I guess Song of Sparrows is also a more hopeful and less dark movie than the previous Majidi flicks. As someone who have seen his movies like Baran and The Colour of Paradise, this one is easier to watch without tears. All in all, it is a purely humanitarian,an overwhelmingly sweet movie that you will just like!

This is about the 6th film of Majid Majidi that I have seen and reviewed. I would see more, but currently these are the only ones readily available here in the US. All are exceptionally well acted and compelling films about working class folks. And, while they lack the glamor and excitement of most films, there is a simple beauty about them that keeps me coming back for more.

Perennial Majidi actor, Mohammad Amir Naji, plays Karim--a poor guy who loses his temper a lot but has a lot of decency buried within him--and a lot to admire. His life seems, for a while, to be nothing but financial hardships. His oldest daughter loses her hearing aid in a stagnant pool, when it's found it is hopelessly ruined AND he loses his job. With no insurance on the hearing aid, he is determined to do anything, or just about anything, to make the money to get the hearing aid. On a lark, he gets work as an independent cabbie--of sorts. He shuttles people and packages all over Teheran on his motorcycle. In addition, when he sees salvageable junk, he carts it home to the countryside where he lives with his family.

At the same time, his young son (who appears to be only about 7) has business plans of his own. Like his father, he has a very strong sense of family responsibility and he and his friends go to amazing lengths to start up an odd little business.

There are many ups and downs in the story, but during all these the family never loses their sense of decency and love--despite Karim being a bit of a blow-hard at home. A very moving tale that really helps you to appreciate all that you have--especially since these people have so little yet seem content. My only reservation, and it's a small one, is that not a lot overtly happens in the film--and it seems a tad incomplete.

In some ways, this film is an awful lot like Majidi's "Children of Heaven"--with the same man playing the father, the same financial problems and the same sense of ingenuity within the children. Both are lovely films, but I strongly recommend you first see "Children of Heaven" or "The Color of Paradise" first--they are great films and represent Majidi at his very best.

another great film from great Majid Majidi. those people who live in Iran can deeply feel the atmosphere of the film.in this film Karim is a symbol of humankind and birds are messengers of god. their appearance each time reminds Karim the fact of his life.every time we hear the sound of sparrows Karim is making a decision and god wants to help him to make the best. it seems that no one else can do this. in this film ostrich is a symbol of Karim and so a symbol of human. ostrich is like birds but can not fly ,so as Karim. he wants to be bad but he cant. some of the shots taken from above seem to be from the gods point of view. for example when Karim goes through a burned field with a blue door on his back, a door to sky, or when he searches for the lost bird. the music from Alizadeh is excellent and really impressive and fits the scenes. it's all about humanity...

'The Song of Sparrows' is at once a beautifully humanistic film in the tradition of Italian neorealism, and an aimless ramble whose perceived themes and moral lessons are hard to decode. The protagonist, Karim (Reza Naji), lives somewhere a motorcycle ride away from Tehran with his wife and three children. Karim is an industrious bumpkin, essentially goodhearted but given to moments of meanness and rage. He gets fired from his job as an ostrich wrangler when during a move of the ostriches to another pen, while he's screaming at the men who're trying to help him, one of the big birds escapes. In one of the film's arresting sequences partly shot from a great distance, he wanders high up in the hills disguised as an ostrich, trying, in vain, to lure back the wayward bird.

One thing leads to another. Karim's deaf older daughter Haniyeh (Shabnam Akhlaghi) drops her hearing aid into the dank storage tank water where his son is playing and it won't work. And so, without money, he goes to Tehran to repair the hearing aid. A man jumps on the back of his motorcycle and gives directions and before he knows it he's one of the city's legion of cycle taxi drivers transporting men and merchandise around town and receiving what for him seem enormous sums for this work.

A series of little vignettes of riders follows. People give him things they consider junk that he thinks are better than what he has at home -- a blue door, and a TV aerial more sophisticated than his neighbors'. He starts an accumulation of this stuff. Some of the men cheat him. Others give him bonuses. All are loud and self-absorbed.

Reza Naji, a regular in Majidi's films, looks like a bedraggled version of Judd Hirsh or the Forties and Fifties Hollywood regular William Bendix. He alternates between moments of taciturnity and hysterical screaming, the latter often directed at his little boy Hussein (Hamed Aghazi), whose entrepreneurial efforts with the storage tank (he and a handful of identical looking boys plan to turn it into a fish farm) he strongly disapproves of, presumably out of pride and a will to dominate. He also brings his gentle, sweet-natured (and generally passive) wife Narges (Maryam Akbari) to tears by violently taking back the blue door when she's given it to a friend. This occasions another of the film's memorable images: Karim carrying the blue door back home across the barren country landscape, seen from high above. He quietly soothes his wife and eases her tears. He's a kind father after his fashion but much of the time his face expresses only blank weariness.

Some viewers interpret the story as a contrast of corrupt city and honest country and see Karim as being tempted into misbehavior by the luxuries of Tehran, but that is an exaggeration. He continues his dogged, not very smart striving from first to last and never stints in his sometimes harsh, sometimes kind, efforts to be a good father to his family. The movie does convey a sense of the prosperity (and ugliness) of Iran's crowded capital. There are well-dressed men constantly on their cell phones rushing around with wads of cash. One of them is moving into a large house and makes Karim carry things. Later Karim is part of a caravan of several dozen motorcyclists sent from a warehouse carrying new appliances and gets lost from the group. He takes the fridge he's been assigned home and later returns with it and tries to sell it.

Some are seduced by the cinematography and it has its moments. What's more engaging is the specificity of the incidents. You learn about motorcycle taxis, and how to move an ostrich (you blindfold it and push it backwards). Judging by the uplifting tone of earlier Majidi films (all shown in the US) like 'Children of Heaven,' 'The Color of Paradise,' 'Baran,' and 'The Willow Tree,' the director is concerned with faith (and the loss of it) but also with social realism, mostly focusing on the poor and the discriminated against but with occasional looks at the middle class.

An accident involving the big pile of junk Karim has collected puts him out of commission and may restore his equilibrium. At least it keeps him at home. Haniyeh's hearing aid seems to have gone back to working on its own. Earlier, Hussein and his buddies succeed in buying a giant plastic "bucket" (the subtitles aren't very good) full of goldfish for the storage tank, which they've cleaned up. But the "bucket" breaks and the boys lose all their fish. The film's most touching scene comes when the boys are crying in the back of a truck and Karim sings a fatalistic, but also funny, song that makes all their tears turn to smiles. It's a totally sentimental moment that I was utterly powerless to resist.

The Song of Sparrows is a simple film about Karim, an uncomplicated man who is a caretaker of ostriches on a farm. One day, one of the birds escapes and Karim is fired. He rides his motorbike to the city in order to get his daughter's hearing aid repaired. Someone mistakes him for a taxi, and he discovers a new way to make money. The problem is that the passengers are mostly rude and nasty to the good natured guy, and it sours his outlook on humanity.

He also becomes a pack rat, picking up all kinds of junk on his daily travels on the "taxi" bike. The stuff piles up, much to the consternation of his wife. He fights with the neighbor over an old, used door that they have borrowed, demanding it back. He loses his temper, and during a rampage, breaks his foot. He must then rely on the kindness of others because he is bound to a bed while his leg heals. The Song of Sparrows is a beautiful movie with excellent performances all around.

A Golden Bear nominee of the Berlin International Film Festival, The Song Of Sparrows is Majid Majidi's first entry into a film festival of such prestige. The Iranian director of critically-acclaimed films such as The Children Of Heaven (1997) and The Color Of Paradise (1999) directs another praiseworthy picture, though I regard this as a less than stellar effort as compared to his best works.

Majidi directs Mohammed Amir Naji to a Best Actor win and deservedly so because his portrayal of the lead character, Karim, is remarkably and convincingly natural. He plays the father of a relatively poor family who loses his job as a worker in an ostrich farm. He has a deaf daughter whose hearing aid is damaged after she dropped it in a water storage tank. Struggling to make ends meet as well as promising her daughter a new hearing aid to help her to cope with the coming exams, Karim goes out into the city to find temporary jobs in his old but dependable motorcycle.

The Song Of Sparrows centers on Karim and uses him as a lens to reveal the two different ways of life inherent in Iran's increasingly urbanized setting – the tight-knitted rural community and the fragmented urban society. In the latter, the pace is fast and at times unsettling. Everyone is in a rush and this forces Karim to adopt a more pragmatic approach to earn a living – offering rides to anyone to anywhere in the city and allow them to pay him any amount they like.

Occasionally, he does the odd job of delivering goods. In one instance, he loses his way and is forced to bring home a small refrigerator for the night. This 'expensive foreign object' causes excitement in the household because they have never seen anything like it before. Majidi, once again, highlights the urbanization, or more precisely, the dawn of urbanization which may change the rural way of life within the next decade or so in Iran.

The conservative and overly protective Karim suffers a serious injury which renders him immobile for quite some time. This frees his children, especially his driven son to chase his own dreams – to rear fishes in the water storage tank and sell them to become a millionaire. Reality says that his dream is improbable because the construct of Iran's society is such that it is impossibly difficult to succeed with a low-class background.

In a brilliant metaphor which describes the harshness of this reality, Majidi directs a scene which shows Karim's son and his friends frantically carrying a heavily leaking barrel containing many live fishes to safety only to trip and fall and see their 'dream' spill away onto the pavement. The Song Of Sparrows features a beautiful score by Hossien Alizadeh, and some impressive cinematography juxtaposing the quiet isolation of rural life and the hustle and bustle of urbanity. It is at times heartwarming, but for a Majidi film, it slightly lacks in emotion and the climax is not as powerful as intended. Nevertheless, The Song Of Sparrows is a decent showcase of the richness of Iranian cinema.

SCORE: 7.5/10 (www.filmnomenon.blogspot.com) All rights reserved!