Children of Heaven is the kind of movie that, if enough people saw it, I really do think might help the current political crisis between Iran and the United States. The movie is not a passionate liberal plea for peace or a preachy expose masked as a political thriller a la Syrania. Rather, it is a totally apolitical film with a very simple story- a boy looses his sister's shoes.
How could a movie like this help the cause of peace? The only information most Americans usually get from Iran is from the news. Whether someone supports or opposes military intervention in Iran (this writer opposes it), we rarely get to hear about, you know, normal people. There are obviously serious problems in the country, both of its domestic treatment of women and its foreign policy towards the West, but that does not change the fact that probably 90%+ of the people living their want peace like everyone else, and they are the ones who would be suffering in the event of a US bombing.
Anyway, on to the movie itself. Heavily influenced by Italian neorealism and the works of Vittorio De Sica in particular, Children of Heaven follows the story of a boy named Ali (Mir Farrokh Hashemian), who, as stated above, looses his sister Zahra's (Bahare Seddiqi) shoes after they are repaired by a cobbler. This is a big deal, since his parents are poor and cannot easily afford a new pair. Instead of tell their father (Mohammad Amir Naji) about the mistake, the children swap the shoes at school, with Zahra wearing them in the morning and Ali in the afternoon. This causes numerous problems, as it makes Ali chronically late and the pair wear themselves out faster.
The movie is not so much about the elaborate procedures and schemes the children go through to make the swap or find a new pair as it is about Ali's guilt. He clearly cannot bear to tell his father, because he knows it will hurt him financially. He is more concerned about his parents well being than his own pride, although we get the feeling that Ali's dad probably would not be as angry as his son thinks.
Children in movies are so rarely allowed to be real children. Usually, they exist to say something cute in a comedy or give an adult character something to fight for in a thriller. Here, director Majidi is familer with how real children actually think. I was reminded of my experiences when I was Ali's age, despite the fact that I was a middle-class suburban American instead of poor urban Persian. That's how universal this movie is.
There are a few flaws to the picture. At times, it seems to be so similar to De Sica's Bicycle Thieves that the homage teeters on the edge of plagiarism, and the last shot is a little too thematically ambiguous. I was a little unsure as to what it actually meant.
But these are relatively minor problems in a deceptively simple movie, with great performances all around a Chaplinesq appeal to everyone, in every culture.
The Children of Heaven (1997)