Majid Majidi has been quietly working away for years building up a body of work of supreme simplicity, beauty, and grace. My favorite example is his story about the two young siblings who, forced by circumstances, share a pair of shoes in Children of Heaven.
His 2005 work, The Willow Tree, takes a darker, moodier, more volatile approach, but Majidi’s light and delicate hand and wonderfully observant eye is still at the forefront. Watching, I often found myself in awe by the sheer simplicity of his scenes and the emotional wallop they packed.
The Willow Tree tells the story of Professor Youssef who has been blind since age eight when fireworks scorched his eyes. He’s now middle-aged, happily married, and lovingly devoted to his young daughter. We meet him at this juncture because doctors have developed a surgical procedure that may restore his sight. The film quickly finds him off to Paris for the operation.
I may be giving too much away by this comparison — at least for people who’ve read Keyes’ book (or the filmic adaptation) — but The Willow Tree offers a structure and effect similar to Flowers for Algernon. In that story, a mentally challenged man is given the chance to live a life of above average intellect through an experimental surgery. His loss of innocence though proves to be a proverbial two-edged sword. Both joy and pain beyond his prior ability to imagine comes with knowing too much.
We see expressions of Youssef’s happiness before the surgery such as the idyllic opening scene where twigs float down a stream rolling and mingling in the gentle turbulence until they arrive at father and daughter, seated under a tree, enjoying the warmth of the afternoon. At another moment, his wedding band slips from his finger and rolls across the floor. As he gropes in despair, his wife nudges it carefully toward his searching hand.
After his surgery, he impatiently tears away his bandages and moves toward the light from a window. His first visual image in decades is of an ant struggling across a window sill under the weight of an enormous crumb. He walks out into the hospital corridor and runs back and forth, giggling childishly until he stops in his tracks, sobered by his reflection in a window — he doesn’t recognize the old man he now sees.
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