‘Beyond the Clouds’ and Beyond the Boundaries

Maryam Papi - Eminent Iranian director, Majid Majidi, revisited India to redeem the failure of his 50 milion USD ' filmMuhammad: The Messenger of God , known as the most expensive film of Iranian cinema. Majidi and his international film crew did not get the nod from the Indian government to shoot in Rajasthan deserts due to some concerns of religious controversies that may arise from an Islamic historical film director.

Having such an experience, Majidi came to India when he decided not only to go Beyond the Clouds but also beyond the borders particularly the religious and the racial boundaries. Majidi's recent film takes him back to the poetic and humanistic realms of his realism. Though the realism he has assumed in India is slightly different from the realism he had practiced in Iran. In India his realism is less conservative and more liberal, and close to the ground realities.

The only religious element in Majidi's recent film is the Islamic names of the siblings: Tara and Amir Nishaan. The recent film, not only shows Majidi's obligations to Muslims but also his soft corner for women. Previously, he never addressed any women issue which is considered to be sensitive in Iran. But after almost three decades of filmmaking, finally he discovered women Beyond the Clouds.

As it always happens in Majidi's realism, some facts are ignored in order to shed light on other facts. In an interview I had with Majidi in Tehran in 2013, he admitted that in a story like Children of Heaven (1997) the interference of the mother would have influenced the entire story.  He said that if the mother was to come to know about the problem of shoes, it would have been solved very soon. Majidi mulled over this matter as the obligation of storytelling. He supposed women as strong poles in Iranian families who can solve these kinds of problems immediately. That is why the mother in Children of Heaven is sick and hardly able to work at home. This manipulation in the story could be deliberated as the filmmaker's failure to represent the non-passive roles of Iranian women in cinema. For this reason, his realism has been criticized for supporting so called 'expired traditional ideas'.

Whereas in India, Majidi narrates a different tale. He has brought out a thought-provoking story of the helplessness of women, whether be a young widow or an elderly mother. The problems of women is only one of the severe social issues of Indian society raised by Majidi in his recent film. He takes his audiences to the vicious world of drug smuggling, crimes, rape, prostitution and last but not the least poverty.

I have watched the recently released Beyond the Clouds in a Sunday evening in a PVR cinema in Delhi. There were not many people in the cinema hall while no competitive Hindi film was on screen at the same time. The box office ticket sellers were wondering why the film tickets sold less than expectations.

The film started almost 30 minutes later than the time mentioned on the ticket. Too many advertisements targeted the audiences who had paid the price of watching the film. As a matter of interest, only few of the advertisements were about the upcoming film.

Finally Majid Majidi's film made a bang in the Indian cinema industry. The film opened to the Indian metropolis, Mumbai. In an abrupt movement, the camera swung from youngsters on motorbike to homeless people under bridge. Likewise, in the entire film, Majidi turned his camera to the overlooked aspects of the crimes happening in India as the unseen realities. He has the same humanistic approach towards the victim as to the criminal. The two characters might replace each other. The victim charged for attempted murder because she hazarded the life of the rapist, who was a single father. In the film, Majidi raised a collection of social pathologies regardless of the social divisions or hierarchical system in Indian society.

The Iranian filmmaker has tried to reduce the bitterness of his story by adding some masala to his recent film. Nevertheless, A. R. Rahman's music has not let the dance scenes to fall in masala films of Bollywood cinema. Majidi had to cope with the fact that Indian audiences hardly watch movies in absence of song and dance.

Likewise, he has come to know that in India, the humanistic approaches of a realistic film must adopt an Indian accent which sometimes gets a vernacular tone. He takes his camera to Mumbai's red-light area to portray a modern slavery system in which women are sold by seeing the health of their teeth, a practice to buy animals in rural Indian markets. The summit of this brutality is portrayed in the manner Amir treats the rapist, Akshi, in the hospital. At the same time, Amir buys him medicines to help him to recover in order to be able to confess his crime in the court. Better than any of his past films, in this recent film, Majidi shows the contradictions of humanistic and inhumanistic features that element human species.

In another effort to get adapted to the Indian tone of humanism and realism, Majidi has been well adjusted with the Indian film crew. Most of his crew members are Indians. Though some of the members of his team have travelled with him from Iran. The screenwriter. Mehran Kashani, the editor, Hassan Hassandoost and the sound supervising editor, Mohamad Reza Delpak are some of the Iranian members of the team. For bridging the two nations, they have diverse concepts to declare Majidi's Indo-Iran message through symbolisms. As a result of their accomplishments, the coughing sounds of a sick mother in the jail and a sick father at home are linked to express how miserly poverty cross the borders even if the border is the thick walls of jail. In another attempt to associate home and jail, the child characters draw a colorful painting on the house's wall. Going into details, the vertical lines of the painting resemble the counting marks in the prisons. Though when the camera moves from the details, a bright colorful place containing houses and trees came into forefront. The skill of a cinematographer is a great assistance to fulfil Majidi's symbolic objectives in the film. The cinematography has come a long with the clashing tone of the Indian realities. Owing to the cinematographic skills, the film characters cannot easily live with their guilt. Anil Mehta's camera approaches the characters as if touching their conscience.

Despite the contrasts between India and Iran, the values and symbols Majidi has collected from Indian society jell with Iranian symbols of realism. The bellowing washed white sheets, as a common motif in Indian cinema, is employed in Majidi's recent film. Spatter of scarlet across the white sheets would turn the life of many people even if a rapist's blood is shed. This turning point happens in the very early moments of the film. In one of the later scenes, the sheets play the role of a curtain to bring security and reliability for the female members of the rapist family.

To prove his identity in a foreign country, Majidi has his own credible films. The siblings could be an Indian version of Children of Heaven's brother and sister, some years later. Now they are grown up and support other children in any condition or clime. The director's another endorsement is the love between two adolescence in spite of the adversaries. It is a reminiscence of the love between characters of other earlier films of Majidi, Rain . A scene in Beyond the Clouds in which the girl character combs her hair and the boy watches her shadow on a curtain is similar to his earlier film. Majidi has adapted many other elements of his earlier films, like the sky, the green light and the senses of discovering the nature which are taken from The Color of Paradise in the film under review.

Even though Majidi's recent film has some unique aspects, some of the very ordinary Indian symbols have attracted his attention and found their way into the film. The Iranian director has tried to include the eye-catching sights of Mumbai in his film as much as possible. Places like the public laundry (Dhobi Ghat) and festivals like Holi are too repetitive for Indian audiences. In one of the closing scenes of the film, the grieving characters dissolve in a deceptive colorful festival. Squeezing Holi festival in a Hindi film is not what an Indian audience expect to watch in cinema however, meeting of grief and joy would be a new approach. These have come in the film which is neither local, nor alien. Therefore, Majidi's contribution to Indian cinema would be an Other's Hindi Film.