1996's A Moment of Innocence (which played in town last year) is the re-creation -- or rather, the exhaustive re-examination from every angle -- of a pivotal event in Makhmalbaf's life. At 17, as a fiery protester against the Shah, Makhmalbaf stabbed a young policeman, and in turn was shot. Twenty years later, the policeman showed up to audition for one of his films, and that spurred Makhmalbaf to make this film. A Moment of Innocence is less a movie about the stabbing than a movie about the making of a movie about the stabbing.
What's nice is that, rather than privileging his own version of the facts, Makhmalbaf opens up the assault to a multiplicity of interpretations. The policeman is allowed some amount of control in the casting and direction of his own memories. As the film progresses, we learn that the original incident was based upon a heartbreaking irony: The policeman hung around his post all day because he'd gotten a massive crush on a young girl who always walked by, but the girl is revealed to have been Makhmalbaf's cousin, who was in on the plot. When the young actor playing the policeman begins to fall in love with the actress chosen for the role of the cousin, history appears doomed to repeat itself. But grace is always possible, provided you never forget the humanity of everyone around you. The movie's final freeze frame is one of the most beautiful images in all of cinema -- redemptive, tender, and yes, chasteningly innocent.
A Moment of Innocence's willingness to let time unfold objectively (minutes stretch by as we watch two people walking in the distance, or talking before bed), and its ingenious play on reality and fiction, make it the quintessential Iranian film of the last several years. The Silence is another wonder entirely -- the poetically subjective story of a young blind boy, Khorshid, employed as an instrument-tuner, whose world is disrupted both by his landlord's threats to evict him and his mother, and by his boss, who wants to fire him.
Meanwhile, inside his head, a completely different reality exists -- one that consists of the chatter of market vendors, the splash of water on a bus window, and the repetition of schoolgirls memorizing Omar Khayam. Above all, it's a reality shaped by music. Khorshid is constantly wandering off to follow street musicians and then getting lost, a situation that occurs so often his mother instructs him to keep his ears plugged when in public.
But no amount of cotton or fingers jammed into his ears can shield Khorshid from an overheard snatch of music -- four dramatic notes that come to haunt him the rest of the film. They're the opening notes to Beethoven's Fifth, of course, and once under their spell, Khorshid hears them everywhere: in the hammering of metalworkers, tapped out on a tambourine, or rapped on a window by his impatient employer.
The elements of The Silence -- the endurance of the poor and physically handicapped, the healing potential of art, the panorama of city life too busy to notice one person's needs -- are familiar from previous Makhmalbaf films, but here they are refracted and reassembled in ways far different from his previous naturalism. "[It is my] passage from realism to surrealism," the director claims in the press kit, though surrealism seems inadequate to describe the film's stunning visualizations. The movie has the vibrant energy of a director determined to see everything in a completely new way. Even actors' close-ups are fractured. The closest Makhmalbaf has come to this in the past is in Gabbeh, and while I always considered that film slightly overrated, it's now clearly nothing more than a preliminary sketch for a completely and remarkably reinvented career.
