majid majidi - The Screengrab

Screengrab Review: "The Song of Sparrows"

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.

Screengrab Review: The Edge of Heaven

By Mike D'Angelo

Like his previous dramatic feature, the Berlin prizewinner Head-On, Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven explores the increasingly porous borders between East and West, shuttling characters back and forth between Hamburg and Istanbul and observing their rootless confusion. Akin divides the film into three chapters, two of which sport titles that announce the impending death of a major character — a structural device that lends even ostensibly mundane scenes a certain uneasy tension. Part One focuses on a cantankerous Turkish émigré (Tuncel Kurtiz) and the hooker (also Turkish) he hires to be his live-in girlfriend (Nursel Köse), to the consternation of his bookish son (Baki Davrak); Part Two follows the hooker's daughter (Nurgül Yesilçay), a student radical in Istanbul who hightails it to Germany following a demonstration gone wrong and falls into a relationship with a young woman (Patrycia Ziolkowska) she hits up for spare change, to the consternation of the woman's stern mother (Fassbinder vet Hanna Schygulla, the only recognizable cast member for most Americans). Part Three shifts the focus again in ways better left unrevealed.