The Silence-a soulful ballad

THE SILENCE
Directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Color bubbles are all around. Hues of bright blue, emerald green, orange,turquoise, all in different shapes and pattern appearing sometimes on the fabric of the loose flowing Tajik tunics worn by the women in the streets and sometimes in their beautiful colored head-scarves, bright red skirts, merry red cherries, the clear blue sky all woven together creating a sumptuous visual treat. And this is also the world experienced by blind 10 year old Khorshid, a kid from an impoverished family in Tajikistan, gifted with a taste of good music.
Sounds are the only way Khorshid makes a sense of the world around him. He works as an apprentice for an old man, tuning musical instruments, earning a meagre salary and helping his mother to make ends meet. However, Khorshid is constantly distracted away through music and sounds and is almost every day late at work. The owner is angry with him. Also lurks over his head is the threat of eviction, for being unable to pay rents. However, Khorshid is too busy to slip into his surreal world, drowned by the sounds which appeal to him. Even efforts by his friends to shut the music away from his ears by plugging them with cotton pods fail. Since music is in his soul and he traverses all obstacles to listen to the calls of his soul.
Hence, you never feel pity for Khorshid’s blindness and his impoverished background. Rather you get intoxicated in the beautiful world he creates around himself through his love for music and sounds. He often follows strangers too lured by their music. Even the daily summons by the land-lord is cue enough for him to make notes of his symphony (and this da-da-da-dum are indeed the first four notes of Beethoven’s 5th symphony). Khorshid is eager to erase the ugliness of his landlord’s greedy knocks everyday banging on his door. Rather he is eager to create a symphony out of these incorporating all the apparent dull and drudgerous activities of hammering utensils and making pots and pans.
Young beautiful Nadereh is loving and affectionate towards Khorshid. An orphan and under the care of Khorshid’s boss, she is keen to protect Khorshid’s musical world from getting shattered by the harsh rebukes of his master. She therefore is always eager to shield and cover him and at times even indulgent in Khorshid’s transcendences into his musical world and absence from work. It seems Khorshid is Nadereh’s sole confidante with whom she can share her heart and her worries. With Khorshid, Nadereh too tries to transcend over her mundane existence and tries to match nature’s beauty. She dances in Balinese style hanging cherries from her ears and placing flower petals on her fingernails. She even indulges herself in the narcissism of viewing herself on the mirror. Blind Khorshid though blind seems to be perceptive of Nadereh‘s beauty. The internal chemistry between these two young children is also an intelligent hint to the taboos the Iranian film-makers suffer when showing man-woman relationships and intimacy. There are therefore the soulful images of showing mirrors and one face hovering vertically over the other, and picking up the pieces bearing the image of the other. The next scenes are more pronounced with Khorshid sinking exhausted onto the grass bed and the yellow leaves softly blanketing him, while Nadereh rushes back to work.
Images and music are extremely explosive and poignant throughout the film which seems to speak only through the metaphors of images. Hence Khorshid’s mother eviction accompanied by a large mirror reflecting the nature and the sun-ray’s (Khorshid means the sun) is effervescent with emotions and hopes of a poor who if not everything can at least possess the beauty of nature. Khorshid in the meantime, asks the folk musicians to play the galloping tune and he becomes as if Pegasus, trying to shed off all the drudgeries of his poverty-striven life and galloping towards a musical future rich with tunes, rhythm and symphonies.
The Silence seems to be lyrical journey signifying life’s joys amidst the nature and its pain from the unnaturally imposed constraints and restrictions on the human soul. Khorshid suffers continuously throughout the movie to get rid of the dilemma of choosing a dull constricted life away from music or the one which is truly liberated, a world of extreme enchantment amidst the symphonies of the passing sounds and voices. His penchant for liberation of the soul become symbolic in a gorgeous sequence where Khorshid staggers through a rainstorm on a beach carrying a waterlogged instrument that he is suppose to return to his mean boss. The instrument moans as it is destroyed by the elements and then Khorshid liberated, abandons the instrument on the beach to free it from its burden of patronage in wrong hands.
In an interview with Mamad Haghighat, Makhmalbaf talks about his passage from realism to surrealism and when discussing The Silence he says that Khorshid sacrifices the past and the future to live in the moment and the director sees his character as a type of artist. The director goes on to say that life happens in a succession of moments and not in a structured story, yet in this string of moments, Makhmalbaf has created a universal story.
Silence also brings forth the memories of Majidi’s Mohammad from colors of Paradise and which also shows the liberation of Mohammad’s soul and his happiness through his intense gifted sensitivity of the nature and natural being around him.
Tajikistan in 1998 (the year the movie got made) has just come out of a 5 year long ethnic strife and civil war (1992 to 1997). Inflation was soaring high and economically the country was devastated with many leaving the country for Russia for a better future. Almost everywhere the children were working to manage a living. However, these facts though come forth in the movie take a back-seat never arouse pity. Rather e landscapes and visuals resplendent with the whirling colourful skirts of the Tajik women, their brightly patterned head-scarves, the mirror-like streams holding the stunning natural beauty as a permanent reflection we hear a story of hope for a better future with liberated soul free from burden of impositions and bans.