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.

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