Beyond the Clouds: Majid Majidi and Filmmaking in India

Majid Majidi's latest film, "Beyond the Clouds," premiered for the first time at the London Film Festival; a film made in India with predominantly Indian crew and a story intertwined with the fabric of Mumbai. "Beyond the Clouds" is considered Majidi's first film outside of Iran and perhaps a beginning for his return to independent filmmaking, distancing himself from promotional/commissioned films like "Muhammad: The Messenger of God," which was an unsuccessful and superficial film with a government budget reportedly equivalent to that of a Hollywood blockbuster. "Beyond the Clouds" might be a return to the simple world Majidi knows, which peaked in films like "Children of Heaven." The film tells a simple story about a brother and sister (Amir and Tara) in Mumbai, where teenage Amir is involved in drug trafficking while his sister engages in some form of prostitution away from her brother's eyes. However, subsequent events make life even harder for this broken family. The film seeks its strength in beautiful visuals that we have also seen in Majidi's previous films: an effort to create beauty amidst poverty and despair. The final scene of the film is one of these moments that also forms a relatively bold ending: two hands coming together. Majidi rightly avoids false hope and, with a reasonable ending, distances himself from the effort to resolve all problems and present a happy ending (the audience might expect Tara to be released from prison, but we do not see such a scene). The portrayal of poverty and societal issues, however, has a clichéd form that has many similar examples in independent Indian cinema since the 1950s. At the same time, in the creator's view, "family" seems to be the only suitable solution: in the world of the film, this girl and boy have faced this fate because they have lost their parents. Tara's cellmate in prison is a woman with a small child whose husband was killed for beating her (recalling Tara's abuse at the hands of her former husband; thus, Tara is essentially the same imprisoned woman, with a lost child that she ultimately finds). On the other hand, the film places significant emphasis on the absence of the assailant's wife (with two children). Thus, each of the film's "families" has lost one of their members, and the filmmaker implicitly considers this traditional thought to be deeply involved in their problems. "Mothers" are in constant movement throughout the film and play an important role: Tara and Amir have lost their mother, just as the children of the assailant are left motherless, but this man has a mother who ultimately becomes a kind of mother to Tara and Amir. The young boy in prison loses his mother, but Tara somehow accepts her as a mother. This cycle of character interchange links the various characters in the film and emphasizes the inevitability of circumstances (none of the film's characters are traditionally "negative"). However, the film still carries the predominant problem of Majidi's films: creating a melodrama that is overly sentimental and tear-jerking, trying to move the audience's emotions at any cost; although it sometimes succeeds, the film does not need to manipulate the audience's feelings so much and could have focused more on a deeper critique of society apart from the momentary impact on the audience in a specific scene. The excessive use of music creates the film's most significant problem; it seems that Majidi deliberately tries to gain an additional emotional impact through music in every scene (the exact opposite of Asghar Farhadi, who does not use music at all and believes that the structure of the scene itself should engage the audience, not an external element). While the use of music enhances the impact of some scenes (like the scene of escaping among the pigeons), it ultimately has an intrusive presence in many parts and sounds like an additional element, separate from the scene.