Baran is a romantic melodrama, but it is much more than that. It is deeply specific: it involves an Iranian construction worker who falls in love with a crossdressing Afghan refugee who is trying to earn money to support her injured father. But for all of that specificity, it carries all the weight of a fable—a tale with universal importance and appeal. And, Majidi being a religious director, there is also a spiritual significance to the film, and the references and appeals to Scripture were probably not at all unintended.
Lateef (a name which means ‘gentle’ in both Arabic and Farsi) is a young Iranian who works on a construction site. Actually, he has it fairly easy. He’s the tea boy, and his job is to boil tea and carry it on a platter to the other workers on the site. His boss, Memet, in order to get his construction work done faster and cheaper, hires on the down-low Afghan migrants and refugees from the Taliban, who do back-breaking manual labour for cents on the dollar (dinars on the touman?) compared to their Iranian coworkers. One of these, a man named Najaf, falls and breaks his foot; he has to be trucked home. But this incident attracts the attention of government inspectors who question Memet about his illegal hiring of Afghans.
Najaf’s replacement, brought by his brother Soslan, is a young boy named Rahmat (whose name means ‘mercy’ or ‘graciousness’)… who is actually a girl in disguise. After Rahmat has an accident herself and spills half a bag of cement on a fellow-worker from two stories up, Memet assigns the Afghan ‘boy’ to do Lateef’s job—and Lateef to do real construction work.
Lateef, who is money-grubbing, lazy, hotheaded and more than a bit arrogant, holds a grudge against Rahmat and tries to undermine ‘him’ and play pranks on ‘him’ at every turn: including dumping dirty water over ‘his’ head from three stories up, and trashing the kitchen where ‘he’ works. But as Lateef is plotting yet another scheme against ‘him’, he discovers—as the wind wafts away the curtain from the kitchen area and Rahmat is doing up ‘his’ hair—that ‘he’ is actually a she.
Lateef’s attitude toward Rahmat changes, and he begins to observe her more closely. He discovers that she is in fact not an opportunist or greedy at all, and in fact lives up to her name. She does her best to give good tea and bread and cigarettes to the workers, and she takes the scraps and goes up to the third floor of the construction site to feed the doves with them. Lateef observes all of this in secret, and begins to help Rahmat both secretly and in the open. The story is really one about Lateef repenting, about his character changing. He gradually goes from being a grudging, arrogant, pugnacious lout—to also living up to his name.
There is a lot in the story of Lateef that is Jacobean… that is to say, that reflects the story of Jacob as he labours for Laban to win the hand of Rachel. Lateef’s labours for Memet and his acts of kindness toward Soslan and Najaf—and his disappointments when these go astray or unnoticed also reflect this story (as when Laban tricks Jacob into marrying his elder daughter Leah). But there is one scene in particular which reminded me more strongly of Isaac and Rebekah.
There is a scene close to the end of the film, where Lateef is helping Rahmat (whose actual name is Baran, or ‘Rain’) pick up some vegetables that she spilled on the ground. The two of them make eye contact. Their expressions change. It is clear—despite Rahmat-Baran’s character not saying a single word throughout the entire film—that Baran returns Lateef’s feelings for her. But then she puts on her niqâb in front of him. All the time, she does not break eye contact with him, even while the truck which is taking her back to Afghanistan is driving away. But Lateef smiles as he watches one of her footprints being washed away by the rain.
This scene seems to be a direct reference to the passage in Genesis where Rebekah is approaching Abraham’s camp from afar, and notices Isaac at a distance. She questions Abraham’s servant about who he is, and upon learning that this is her intended husband, she leaps down from her camel and veils herself before him, presenting himself to her as a bride. The emotional poignancy of this scene is enriched by this parallel to the Hebrew Scriptures.
Again, this is such a sweet, beautiful, wholesome, heartfelt film that its appeal becomes broadly universal despite the deeply Central-Asian particularity of its setting and characters, and the barriers of language and class and sexual mores that divide the two protagonists from each other. The cinematography is also amazing… Majidi has the ability to create a film that has a certain weight, using natural lighting and long static shots in order to mimic the same effect that American movies had from twenty years before (but have since lost). I highly, highly recommend Baran as a film with both deeply human and deeply spiritual significance.
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