A moral fable prone to insistent moralizing, Majid Majidi’s The Song of Sparrows utilizes its non-professional actors, familiarity with its settings, and persistent score to extol the virtues of community and altruism, and condemn those qualities’ capitalist converses. Majidi’s follow-up to The Willow Tree exudes an authentic, lyrical sense of environment that helps poeticize the rural and demonize the urban, a hackneyed dichotomy that sums up virtually everything the story has to offer. The individual who learns that generosity, faith and selflessness are preferable to greed, spite and egotism is Karim (Mohammad Amir Naji), an ostrich farmer who lets one of his birds escape, loses his job, and while in Tehran attempting to repair his deaf daughter’s hearing aid, is mistaken by a cell phone-chatting businessman for one of the metropolis’ myriad motorcycle taxis. Seizing this professional opportunity, Karim begins making a decent wage and, along with the free scrap he procures from a construction site, is soon living the (relative) good life. However, as hammered home by lingering close-ups – all italicized by handholding ominous and/or treacly music – his entrepreneurial endeavor has corrupted his soul with avarice and selfishness.
It’s a homily about the ethically and spiritually corrupting influence of the city, and of that milieu’s capitalist ethos, straight out of an Industrial Revolution-era sermon. And it’s one only sporadically elevated by Majidi’s compelling evocation of his polar-opposite locales. Karim’s house may be situated in an arid, barren landscape but there’s nonetheless comfortable warmth to The Song of Sparrows’ depiction of the family’s home-life interactions, as well as that of neighbors relying on each other for support. Yet even when affectingly portraying the day-to-day routines of his characters, the Iranian director employs a variety of broad dramatic, comedic and thematic brushstrokes to deliver his central message, from an incident where Karim doesn’t correct a man’s accidental over-tip and then later has an honest passenger return excess change, to Karim accepting a shirt from a tactless customer and staring into the mirror with swelling pride. “He’s come over to the dark side!” screams this latter moment, though there’s little exigency to his transformation, since the comfortable rhythm of Majidi’s film makes plain that just as Karim has been tainted by his new life, so too will he eventually find redemption by abandoning the alluring capital.
Majidi’s cast is consistently artless, and his direction has a tastefulness that belies its frequent lack of subtlety, which is epitomized by Karim’s recurring encounters with ostriches (or their eggs) that serve as omens that the humble man has lost his way. Such grating gestures are complemented by a subplot about Karim’s son Hussein (Hamed Aghazi) – who shares with his father a distinctly Simpsonian, Homer-Bart dynamic – working to clean out a sludgy water supply and populate it with fish that he thinks will net him and his friends millions. It’s a tangent that not only reinforces the primary thread’s belief that man’s bonds with kin, the natural world and God are vital, as well as threatened by base, materialistic economic ambitions, but also affords a chance for teary-child mawkishness. Given the preachiness of the story, however, the fact that The Song of Sparrows ultimately embraces slushy melodrama outright isn’t surprising, though it is disheartening, especially in light of the final, mesmerizing slow-motion shots of undulating ostriches that prove tender, potent symbols of nature’s preeminent majesty.
