Everyone answers this question differently, but for me The Color of Paradise crossed the line early, and kept right on going.
The story follows Mohammad (Mohsen Ramezani), a young blind boy who returns to his village after his school year in Tehran. Mohammad is thrilled to use his newly learned skill in Braille to decode the countryside around him, reading wheat stalks and pebbles in the stream. His sisters and grandmother are delighted that their beloved boy has returned. His father Hashem (Hossein Mahjub, in a marvelous portrayal of middle-aged frustration and guilt), meanwhile, sees Mohammad only as a burden to be endured, or pawned off to a nearby carpenter, also blind, who could take the boy on as an apprentice.
There are several fine moments, and one can only admire the deliberate intelligence director Majid Majidi (Children of Heaven) brings to such scenes as when Mohammad -- listening intently, and delicately probing the ground with trembling fingers -- returns a fallen baby bird to its nest. But all too often you recoil from cheap sentimentality. The recent release of Makhmalbaf's similarly themed The Silence only underscores this film's calculated artificiality. In fairness, I can imagine several people preferring Color's straightforward heart-on-sleeveness to The Silence's fractured poetics. But that's only because Majidi is so busy telling them what to look at, and how to think about it when they do. In these two films about the world of the blind, it's Makhmalbaf who trusts that the audience can really see.
