Beyond the Multiplex

"The Willow Tree" One of the minor consequences of the 2005 election of nutso Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been that the flow of pictures to the West from Iran's troubled but always vital film industry has almost stopped. I don't think this is actually the Iranian government's doing, since censorship in that country has always worked at the level of domestic distribution, not film production. It's more like political issues and news headlines got in the way, making Iranian films even a harder sell in the United States than they were already. (It's become nearly impossible even for major Iranian filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami or Mohsen Makhmalbaf to visit the U.S., which is bizarre since they are hardly defenders of the current government.) All that is by way of saying that Majid Majidi's exquisite film "The Willow Tree" is likely to make a very brief stop in theaters en route to home video, so catch it when and if you can. Majidi's work (which includes "Baran," "The Color of Paradise" and "The 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." A middle-aged academic named Yusef (Parviz Parastui), who has been blind since childhood but is happily married with a young daughter, miraculously regains his sight after having corneal surgery in France. (Majidi needs to make no political commentary when he shows the way women dress in Paris and in Tehran.) Yusef comes home to discover that he doesn't find his own wife attractive; his uncle's babealicious young sister-in-law, though, is another story. 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, depicting Yusef's descent into madness and self-destruction in a series of haunting, masterfully constructed sequences. A beautiful film, both simple and profound, which suggests that bargaining with God is a bad idea in all cultural traditions. (Opens Aug. 3 at Lincoln Plaza in New York, with wider release to follow.)

"Colossal Youth" There's no way to grapple with the ambiguous phenomenon that is Portuguese director Pedro Costa in this amount of space. Let's just say that his slow-moving, impressively photographed and deliberately repetitious zero-tech docudramas about the degraded lives of the poor will infuriate and alienate far more people than they please, but that to a certain small population of film-school enthusiasts, he might be the hottest thing in world cinema. "Colossal Youth" has no plot to speak of, and requires some understanding of Portuguese society to make sense at all. Crucial elements are unexplained: The dour protagonist, a black Cape Verdean immigrant named Ventura who lives in a Lisbon neighborhood being cleared for urban renewal, keeps paying visits to people he says are his children, even though they are white and he seems not to know basic facts about their lives. Long, semi-improvised scenes go seemingly nowhere; Ventura lies on the bed of his non-daughter Vanda while she tells him that she's wiped her eyes with a baby wipe and now they sting. (Indeed that was pretty dumb.) Like Costa's other films, "Colossal Youth" is officially fiction, although the actors are people he meets on the streets of Lisbon and they generally have the same names as their characters. Eventually, across the monumental boredom, mesmerizing, nearly still images and poetic rhythms of this 155-minute film, something like pathos or meaning can be sensed, if not really apprehended. Certainly the lyrical love letter Ventura composes for an illiterate friend, to send back to his wife in the islands, becomes a heartbreaking mantra for their lives of ruination and despair as we hear it again and again (and again). I'm genuinely glad I made it all the way through "Colossal Youth," but remain agnostic about whether the pain was worth it. Consider yourself warned. (Opens Aug. 3 at Anthology Film Archives in New York, as part of their Costa retrospective, which will eventually tour to other cities.)

"The Camden 28" An inspiring, straightforward documentary that explores one of the most interesting activist exploits of the Vietnam era, when 28 protesters -- many of them Roman Catholics motivated by religious faith -- broke into an office building in Camden, N.J., and tried to destroy an entire draft board's records. As director Anthony Giacchino gradually develops through interviews with surviving activists, FBI agents and historians, the result of their arrest was an intriguing trial that explored the most fundamental underlying issues of social morality and personal responsibility in a time of war. Not exactly blazing cinema, but intellectually riveting. (Now playing at Cinema Village in New York, with more cities, and DVD release, to follow.)

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