Bashu, le petit étranger

"Bashu" is special, important, soulful, educational, touching and not to be missed by anyone who even mildly likes film.

Aside from the cinematography acting as a medium and taking the viewer into the world of rural Iran, director Bahram Beizai uses supernatural touches to move the audience. Sussan Taslimi is tough and beautiful; the children in the film are delicious; the elders of the village are real, hateful, human.

Very little dialogue moves the story along, another feature that makes this film watchable. The piece is shot with trust and slowness that you can bathe in the surroundings without having to feel that you are on a mystery hunt. There is mystery of course and not all of it is explained. It certainly is not a Hollywood movie. It is not even a European movie. it is simply, A MUST SEE MOVIE.

Bashu deals with a very complex issue which is the vast cultural differences in Iran. It is masterfully done by one of the best directors of Iran, Bahram Beizai. Bashu is the name of a young boy from South-Western part of Iran who happens to end up in Northern part of Iran and experiences the cultural shock. In comparing these two parts of Iran, Beizai masterfully brings out the differences between the people, the climate, the costume, the language, and the past influence of Super-powers (Russia in the North and Britain in the South) meanwhile tying the story together to make a delightful movie.

I saw this movie when it was first released, and have watched it over and over again and recommend it to all.

I am in complete agreement with the other positive comments posted for this movie. The director certainly knows how to frame a striking visual image.

One additional comment needs to be shared. The version of this movie currently on video (Year 2004) is very sparsely subtitled. The second hour has much more dialog than the first, but after the first hour, the subtitles grow fewer and farther between.

Also, the subtitling does not indicate what languages or dialects are being spoken at any given time. Each line of dialog is (sometimes) translated into English for the viewer, but it is often not clear that the tongue being spoken is foreign to the other characters hearing it in the scene.

A simple, human, quite touching Iranian film, about a 10 year old boy whose family is killed when the Persian Gulf is bombed by Iraq. Fleeing the war, he stows away on a truck and ends up in the verdant, peaceful north, where he struggles to fit in and start a new life. His adopted new small town is suspicious of outsiders, especially those with darker skin, and the boy speaks Arabic, whereas the locals speak a regional language. But he slowly finds his way, and finds love in a gentle, big hearted film about family, re-birth and hope.

It's amazing how many good films have come out of Iran over the last generation. It's really become one of the last bastions of thoughtful, humanistic drama.

The Iranian movies continue to astonish me. Beside Kiarostami, the number of Iranian directors making great movies is overwhelming. It is one of the most important movie schools, and the most amazing is that each of their movies is so firmly implanted in the Iranian universe while speaking out universal values.

It was by chance that I watched Bashu today. I had found it on youTube, I had noted the address, to access it later. I decided this morning to see it, just to discover that my notice with the youTube address was lost! I gave a search on the web for Iranian movie with a boy who lost his family and I found it again! A ten years boy looses all his family when the village is bombed during the Iran-Iraq war. He escapes jumping on a cargo truck where he falls asleep. When he wakes up, he is in an unknown place where the landscape is totally different from what the boy knows. Unknown people speak an unknown language and look very different from him. Impossible to understand anyone, impossible to be understood.

No wonder: the boy is from a province in the Southern part of Iran, near the Persian Gulf, and speaks Arabic, while the region where he has arrived is in the North, near the Caspian Sea, where people speak a very remote dialect of Farsi.

But this we'll know much later, probably after the end of the movie, when we start to look for comments and reviews. During the movie we are absorbed in a universe of fantastic that calls in mind the stories of Eliade.

What follows is a great story of love: maternal love and filial love. A woman with two kids of her own, initially reticent, will learn to love the boy like a mother, while the boy, initially just scared, will learn to love his new mother. And this unfolds despite the absolute barrier of language. Development of love, marked by moments when each of the two, the woman and the boy, just realize, with pain and joy, the intensity of the developing sentiment.

Apparently a simple story, actually told with great cinematic finesse. A story rendered with a perfect economy of means: there is a lot that happens there on the screen, while nothing is superfluous, while each scene comes exactly when need is, no earlier, no later. And all the time you feel that the director is in perfect control.

And above all, the great humanity that paces the movie, almost unbearable!