THE SILENCE (SOKHOUT)
Reviewed by Harvey Karten New Yorker Films/MK2 Productions Director: Mohsen Makhmalbaf Writer: Mohsen Makhmalbaf Cast: Nadareh Abdelahyeva, Tahmineh Normatova, Goibibi Ziadolahyeva
Imagine you're about to have some guests for an afternoon party. You go to the baker's for bread and cake, to the liquor store for wine, to the appetizer's for smoked salmon. All the while you scurry about you're thinking about the festivities which are to begin in four hours. You wonder whether your party will succeed, get good word-of-mouth, make your friends jealous. At the same time you think back thirty years to the time you shopped in similar places for your mother, and regret the passing of years. This is the mundane, daily life of the middle-class American, and who's to complain?
Now think of a different situation. You go to the bakery and, instead of thinking of the future (however near) or the past (however remote), you're taking in the smells and sounds and feel of the place. Your mind is centered on the moment, the sort of affair that the swamis and gurus tell us is life's most desirable activity.
Now change your flow of thought to the movies. Would a dramatization of this concept be much of a story to show on the wide screen? Probably not, you say. Cinema, at least as we in the world's capital of the art form believe, is action. We worship a strong plot with a firm trajectory, each action propelling the next to a blockbuster conclusion. While this sort of narrative appears to have captured the world's primary audience for the pictures, there is yet another form of powerful cinema, one which is minimalist by contrast, and yet which leads by its succession of images to a commanding place in the mind of sophisticated viewers. "The Silence," known in its director's native Iran by the Farsi title "Sokhout," is such a yarn, centering on a ten-year-old boy who is in a way the sort of kid that Spielberg could dream up to introduce him and his audience to a mysterious world barely known. The youngster who is the focus of Mohsen Makhmalbaf's drama is Khorshid (Tahmineh Normatova), a ten-year-old who is blind but who is not overly sheltered by his poverty-stricken mother whose husband had some time back run off to Russia. ("The Silence" was filmed in Muslim Tadjikistan, which became independent of the former Soviet Union just a decade or so ago and where the women, by contrast with Iran, do not wear chodors.)
There isn't much of a plot to "The Silence," but that's hardly the point. The boy goes to work by bus, often escorted by his sighted friend Nadereh (Nadereh Abdelahyeva), where he uses his skilled ear to tune stringed instruments for an old man who runs a shop. The conflict, such as there is one, exists in the forthcoming dismissal of this lovely child by his boss because his little employee is often late to work. Though Khorshid regularly blames the bus for being tardy, the real reason for his detainment is that he becomes fascinated along the way the sounds of nature which, to him, come across literally as music. He can spend several minutes listening to a bee buzz as it crawls about a jar and flies off, and he prays for the winged creature's safe journey. When Khorshid shops among the street merchants for bread with his mother, he hears the sales pitches of the colorfully-garbed women as though they were a chorus in an opera and uses his acute senses to select a loaf not by its freshness but by the pleasing voice of its merchant. Even the dreaded knocks by his mother's landlord on the door of their modest home sound to him not like the dissonant timbre of a Stravinsky ballet but like the four opening notes of Beethoven's 5th Symphony. When Khorshid listens to boys his own age hammering out objects on their job without rhythm or meaning, he instructs them to hit the objects with the cadence of these same four notes until, in one climactic scene, he conducts a large "orchestra" of street drummers in part of the first movement of the Fifth.
By this movie, acted with perfectly natural performance by the entire ensemble, Mohsen Makhmalbaf does indeed appear to take on the guise of the Indian gurus who urge us to live in the present. Life is precious, too cherished to spend our moments giving much thought to the past or to plan for the future however close. Think only of the moment. Take in the glorious sounds of nature and of human beings. The most ordinary activities can reverberate like a Verdi masterpiece. In fact, there is no such thing as a mundane moment. The world is an enchanted place of glorious consonance. A little boy can lead you to view it as such, or so says this consummate film.
Not Rated. Running Time: 76 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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