My conviction in writing about a film produced 5 years ago is not merely my personal preoccupation with it; if cinema is art, then, the influence of a film may be long-lasting, we can even claim that some of the contemporary productions deserve to be qualified as timeless. A 2001 production, Baran (Amazon UK | Amazon US) brought its director Majid Majidi several awards in national and international scales. The success of this movie bears upon the creative style of the director who also produced award-winning movies such as Colour of Paradise and Children of Heaven. Today, Iranian cinema presents itself as an alternative to Hollywood, and Majidi is one of the promising new generation directors within this trend.[1] Baran is not only successful in terms of technique and shooting it employs but also in undertaking a political theme in a subtle-artistic way without taking it as its major aim. The film focuses on the lives of the Afghan refugees who keep on crossing Iranian border since the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The exploitation of these refugees in an already corrupt economic system and their struggle to enter into the country despite this fact is well represented within the film. However, the film goes beyond depicting merely the poverty suffered by these people. It is a testimony that life is precious and meaningful even in most wretched circumstances. By featuring ordinary people as its protagonists, it is also exemplary that simple people can be as appealing stars as super heroes and top models when represented within a conscious scenario and cinematography. This is not a review of the film from an expert’s point of view. Coming from an architecture history/theory background, I would like to focus specifically on time and space as represented in the film. Before my interpretation of how the film plays on the notions of space and time, it is propitious to briefly introduce the theme first.

The season is winter and the place is peripheries of Tehran. Baran focuses around a seventeen-year-old Kurdish teenager Lateef and his simple life at a construction site managed by so-called Memar, the site foreman. Lateef’s major job is to serve tea, prepare food and buy the needs of the workers from the market. Most of the workers at the construction site are illegal Afghan refugees with no identity cards as they provide cheap labour. However, seeing the complexity of the problem, one cannot simply blame Memar for this. Memar is both the exploiter and the protector of these people; at times of inspection, he hides Afghan workers from construction engineers and no matter how, at the end of the day, he provides bread for these workers. One day, one of the Afghan workers Najaf falls and breaks his leg. The next day, his friend Soltan comes with Najaf’s fourteen-year-old son Rahmat to replace his father. After a moment of reluctance, Memar accepts the child for work. However, the boy proves to be too fragile to carry cement bags or brick blocks, so Memar gives him Lateef’s job who is much stronger to take on significant manual tasks. After this event, Lateef proclaims Rahmat his ultimate enemy and sabotages whatever he does. One day, sneaking through the kitchen door, Lateef is amazed by the discovery that Rahmat is in fact a girl. Then, he turns into Rahmat’s protector. His monotonous life is charged with meaning as he watches the girl every day. However, one day Rahmat is caught by construction inspectors; without knowing what to do, she panics and runs away from them. Lateef interferes with the situation until he confuses inspectors and saves Rahmat at the cost of his own security. He is beaten up and taken to the police while Memar is charged a fine for employing illegal Afghans whom he is not allowed to accept anymore.

Lateef’s little love story is disrupted by this unfortunate event, but he keeps on persevering by trying to find Soltan who could give him information about his lost beloved. He goes to the Afghan refugee village and inquires about Soltan without finding any clues in the first day. In the courtyard of a shrine, his beloved is attending a milk ceremony in her green-feminine clothes. Although the camera zooms into her and shows her being bewildered by seeing Lateef there, he does not notice her. The next day, Lateef finds Soltan and learns that Rahmat works in the river near the village. Rushing on to the riverside, Lateef sees her carrying stones outside the riverbed along with other women. This far more demanding job and her pitiful state devastates Lateef who shed touching tears while watching her. He returns to the construction site, determined to talk to Memar in order to get all his savings from him. He gives all of this money to Soltan in order to pass it on to Najaf so that Rahmat does not need to work anymore. The next day, he sees Najaf himself who informs that Soltan has left for Afghanistan with Lateef’s money. Things get even more hectic when Najaf has emerging family problems in Afghanistan. The only good thing that happens the next day is that Lateef learns that Rahmat’s real name is Baran which means rain in Persian. Determined to help her get rid of the hard duties she is under, Lateef sells the only remaining valuable thing he owns; his identity card. When he brings its money to Najaf, he witnesses that they decide to move back to Afghanistan with the help of this money.

The last day he sees Baran has a magical atmosphere. Helping the family load goods to the truck, he comes face to face with Baran. Vegetables of all colours scatter on the ground and they both kneel and pick them up one by one while smiling at each other. Then, Baran stands up and closes her face with her green burqa and walks away to the truck. Her shoe gets stuck in the mud, Lateef helps her take the shoe back and leave. The truck drives away and Lateef is left alone with the footprint as it starts to rain. The rain gradually covers the footprint. Lateef smiles bitterly while watching the footprint fade away.[2]

It is impossible to narrate all the details of the film in an essay. The condensed summary of the scenario goes as above. The symbolism that connects people, objects and gestures within the film is outstanding. What starts as the banality of every day life turns into a spiritual journey for Lateef, in which he makes the ultimate self-sacrifice he can afford without thinking of a short-term benefit. This transformation also transforms the profane space into sacred space as in many of love-story themes. However, what strikes me in this film is its originality in representing very reminiscent, almost classical romance themes in a quite creative and unique interpretation. The disguise of a woman as a man is quite common in Oriental literature and even in Shakespeare. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is a prominent example of this genre.[3] However, unlike these Western examples, in Baran, the disguise is not playful but compulsory taking its motive from survival. It comes from the necessity to bring food to the starving family. The disguise is not the leading theme and the biggest surprise of the scenario, either. It only serves to reverse feelings and increase the effectiveness of final revelation. The other obvious romance theme is the shoe and footprint scene. However, unlike the common tale, the shoe does not help lovers to unite in an eternal bliss; on the contrary, they unite only momentarily for a few seconds just to notice that they have to depart soon. Thus, eternity is fit into a couple of seconds. Time and timelessness meet each other.

Space and time are two notions intricately employed in the film. Although the film is taken in Tehran, most spaces of the film are marginalised spaces in the urban realm such as the remote construction site, refugee village or dark streets through which Lateef wanders in order to find out an illegal way of earning instant money. The construction during the day is continuously in the state of becoming with noise, dust and smoke almost resisting the effort of the workers to turn it into an inhabitable space whereas at night, it transforms into their home lit by candles and warmed by fire and folk songs. These are the spaces of marginalised people in which fake IDs, extra work and lower wages are commonplace. Behind the guise of chaos, they embody strict rules of social order. The limits and means of communication determine the activity patterns within social space. For example, more than four accents are spoken at the construction site ranging from Kurdish to Arabic. However, effective-hierarchical communication is still possible within this diversity. Furthermore, there is obvious lack of verbal communication between Lateef and Baran. Baran never talks throughout the film and except for the last revelation scene, whether it is at the construction site, behind the door of her house or in front of the milk boiler, she is always surrounded by mist or shadow that limit and enframe her appearance. Nevertheless, the love story is hardly platonic or one-sided, as gestures take the place of the words in revealing feelings.[4] The tension of distance between the lovers becomes the spatial manifestation of love.

Despite the fact that the movie narrates not more than a couple of days’ time frame, the velocity of events and the intensity of the narrative mark the passage of time. Thus, what could be very slow focusing on a limited number of people and events become vibrant through this velocity. Another important notion related with representing time is the side-by-side depiction of the trivial with the sublime. Through contemplation and sentiment, what is trivial and mundane in daily life suddenly becomes timeless and sacred through the passage of time. This is a subtle way to render daily life as magical depending on one’s own perception. It is obvious that we spectators see the world through Lateef’s eyes most of the times. Poverty of space is enriched by interplay of colours and textures. By doing this, Majidi not only shows how daily life can become a curious film theme, but he also achieves a timeless artefact multivalent in meaning, open to several readings, the political allusions only being one.

Dr. Selen B. Morkoc
Lecturer and Researcher
Adelaide University