Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Sokout

The music I seek everywhere, find some bad some good some enthralling some uplifting, but music?, the beauty I create around me in which I can live, the beauty which only matters to me is the story of Sokout (int'l title: The Silence), yet another great Iranian film. A Tajik boy, Khorshid, blind, doesn't care for much anything but music; a Tajik girl, Nadereh, not blind, doesn't care for much anything but entering into his world. Around them is the world where music is everywhere, even when the landlord bangs doors to ask for money, and yet a world which does not have anything to give to these two artists except its beauty.

Khorshid often talks of bees, often answers questions about bees; and yet he is only in an instrument maker's shop. The instruments that come out from the shop are so often railed at by people: they only eke out sad cacaphonous poetry. Just as Khorshid is the yet untrained bee seeking nectar, and not yet knowing that the beggar might be a beautiful artist, but is helpless in the face of a world that loves money. Just as he himself might be deemed a defective instrument of mankind whom believers would bewail for. Nadereh takes the piece of mirror that reflects Khorshid; whatever is left is Khorshid's. As he seeks blindly the beauty in his sensations, Nadereh has already possessed him: doing so not by seeking to become the objective beauty whom he will sense, but being one with the beauty itself and thus feeling what is it he senses, becoming the between between sensing and sensed. An extraordinary poetic canvas brought to lyrical life by music and Persian language, the film goes beyond any attempt to define it. Life, poetry, earth.