I personally have a certain mistrust for the movies that attempt to affect the audience sentimentally; I do not favor my mind being taken hostage by the director through affection and tears which I think happened to some extent in Pearl Button. However this does not even slightly devalue this great work of art in my opinion.
The movie explores the astonishing world of the old natives and tries to visually find a language for the modern man to understand this lost world at least partially. It seems that a magnificent and unique world has been lost to us due to the arrogance of modernity, science and industrial age.The director tries to show the audience that this forgotten old world was not the world of mindless savages, as many want us to believe for glorifying the progress of capitalism and modernity.
I also love how the movie draws the absurdity of the brutal crimes happened by the hands of oppressors in the face of the vast universe.
Story of the Jemmy Button made a lot of sense to me as an immigrant and an Iranian. Jemmy Button lost his land, his freedom and his identity for some pearl buttons; when he returned to his land he was never able to be at peace with his new identity or his old ways of life again.
For a second I re-thought myself as the Jemmy Button of the modern era.
I felt that I was fooled by the shining pearl buttons which for me was the American Commercial Cinema, the Western false promises of corporate freedom, free market and the colorized advertisement of the American globalized consumerism and its ways of life. It seems that I and many like me are losing their sense of attachment with their ancestors and history. We are adapting this absurd but powerful consumerist identity that has no real value like the pearl buttons, but is very shiny.
