A BLIND BOY WHO SEES : 'The Color of Paradise'.

There's a hauntingly beautiful scene at the start of The Color of Paradise, Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi's luminous trip into the world of an eight-year-old blind boy. While waiting for his father on a bench outside his special-needs school, the boy, Mohammad (Mohzen Ramezani), hears the frantic squawk of a tiny bird in the woods behind him. He follows the sound, groping on hands and knees through leaves to find the lost chick. Then, still navigating by ear, he locates the bird's tree, climbs up, and returns the fledgling to its nest alongside chirping siblings. Afterward, exhausted but happy, Mohammad doesn't realize that his father has arrived to pick him up, and is watching. We do, though, and what we see revealed on the father's face isn't love or pride, but rather the grim weariness of a man who views his son as a burden.

Rife with symbolism, taking aim unabashedly at the deepest pathos, The Color of Paradise offers an evocation of childhood reminiscent of Truffaut, or Lasse Hallstrom's My Life as a Dog. The film works with a meditative, visually poetic style that requires--and rewards--a certain patience in a viewer. This is the kind of cinematic experience that reminds you why taking a break from American movies is so good for your health. It's quiet and slow and utterly thrilling.

Majidi's lone previous film to be distributed in the United States, Children of Heaven, chronicled Tehran's poor through the tale of a brother and sister and a lost pair of sneakers. The Color of Paradise turns to the countryside, narrating a poignant family conflict centered on Mohammad's widowed father, Hashem (Hosein Mahjoob), a peasant farmer and charcoal burner. Overwhelmed by his responsibilities, including caring for two little daughters and an aged mother, Hashem is headed toward middle age alone, and he's afraid. Having set all his hopes on marrying the daughter of a local wealthy man, he's desperately intent on putting his best self forward, and frantic to think that something might get in his way--including Mohammad. Hashem's rejection of the boy is part visceral revulsion at vulnerability, but also a shamed and superstitious feeling that as long as he has a handicapped son, he's going to be a loser. Who will marry a man with a blind son? The thought knocks him back again and again into the depths of an agonized selfishness. "Can't you keep him?" he pleads with the director of the school in Tehran, as the boy waits outside.

Majidi refrains from reducing the father to simple villainy--we pity him for his loneliness, we sense his guilt concerning his son--but he's in the grip of dreadful temptations. In a quietly shocking scene at the charcoal-burning site, Mohammad wanders off toward the deep woods, and Hashem, pretending not to notice, lets him go. A co-worker steers the boy back, but by then we've seen the father's darkest wishes revealed; and what's more, so has he.

The Color of Paradise is an overtly religious movie, rich in spiritual implications that fit easily into a Christian framework. Hashem recognizes the evil in himself; but with no basis for acting other than a raging sense of life's unfairness, he cannot free himself from it. Self-knowledge unredeemed by faith and love is worse than a tragedy, Majidi is saying, or perhaps less than one: it's a nightmare, a battle with demons that the demons will win. When Hashem apprentices the boy to a tradesman in a distant town who works with the blind, and his mother--a piously religious woman--reproaches him, he rails against her God, a blast of despair and self-pity from which the mother recoils in dismay. Does she want him to go get Mohammad? he shouts at her, finally; is that what she is after? "I'm not worried about Mohammad," she answers, quietly. "I'm worried about you."

And worry she should. With his dark clothes and gloomy face, his cramped and smoldering emotions, Hashem resides spiritually in one of those charcoal-burning hovels where he toils his days away; he lives in a world without color. The blind Mohammad, on the other hand, sees in brilliant tones of joy. Though he can't see the threads his grandmother and sisters dip in boiling vats of wildflower dye, nimbly he sorts out the threads of the audible world: music and a warbling dove in a Tehran shop; a cat's low yowl; the tumbling rush of a brook. Riding a bus with his father, he reaches his hand out the open window. "I want to catch the wind," he says. Hashem, lost in his troubles, pays no attention; but we understand perfectly the reality of Mohammad's life, with its never-ending quest to grasp the invisible.

Majidi and his director of photography, Mohammad Davoodi, have filled The Color of Paradise with sumptuous, Sound of Music-style panoramas of the Iranian countryside: meadows brilliant with wildflowers, a line of trees atop a hillside, swaying seas of alfalfa. These broad vistas alternate with close studies of Mohammad's hands, irrepressibly exploring everything--plants, a stream, his grandmother's lined face. "God is not visible," he says, repeating the words of a teacher at his school. "You can see him through your fingertips."

What's so winning about The Color of Paradise is that it works both as spiritual parable and as a richly detailed, specifically imagined human story. The religious meanings are there for the taking--the blindness of a life without God, the beauties of a larger realm invisible to us all--and yet the film never loses its grasp on vivid human actuality. As Mohammad, Mohzen Ramezani, himself obviously blind, wears an oversized grin and incongruous, movie-star sunglasses, and when his face puckers into a sob, it's heart-wrenching.

Steering father and son toward their respective fates, The Color of Paradise proceeds with the clarity and inevitability of fable, striking hardly a false note until the very end, when Majidi attempts a closing visual gesture sure to strike some as sentimental and intrusive. To me it seemed simply unnecessary, an attempt to deliver too literally a feat the previous ninety minutes of joy and sorrow had already wonderfully pulled off: letting us see the hand of God at work in the ceaselessly active hands of a brave blind boy.

Rand Richards Cooper is the author of The Last to Go and Big as Life.