The Willow Tree.

"The Willow Tree is the first film from Iranian director Majid Majidi to deal primarily with adults rather than children, but its main character - an awkward, laconic college professor named Youssef (Parviz Parastui) - is in many ways more childlike than any child," writes Julia Wallace in the Voice.

"Majidi's work (which includes Baran, The Color of Paradise and Children of Heaven) has always been based in folk tale and spiritual allegory, and The Willow Tree comes under the heading of 'Be careful what you pray for,'" writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Developing a story of erotic fixation in a cinema that can't show so much as an ankle or a shoulder is challenging, but Majidi pulls it off with panache... A beautiful film, both simple and profound, which suggests that bargaining with God is a bad idea in all cultural traditions."

In the New York Times, Stephen Holden argues that Paradise and Willow should be viewed as a "matched pair": "Both films are explicitly religious, intensely poetic meditations, filled with recurrent symbols and suffused with a spirit of divine apprehension. Both are sad beyond measure, and both risk seeming mawkishly sentimental."

Posted by dwhudson at August 3, 2007 3:10 AM