The White Balloon

THE WHITE BALLOON   ****

Jafar Panahi

1995

IDEA:  A young girl in Tehran contends with a series of mishaps when she goes to buy a goldfish for the New Year. 

BLURB:  For a film so unassuming and small-scale, The White Balloon stands tall: in Iranian cinema, in child-centered cinema, in the art of nimble, concise yet expansive miniatures that communicate more in a minute than many films do in multiple hours. Every aspect of Kiarostami’s script and Panahi’s direction are precisely judged without once feeling effortful; the same can be said, even more miraculously, of seven-year-old Aida Mohammadkhani, who carries the film on her diminutive shoulders in a performance as large as life. Or as large as a child’s life, anyway, which is to say, huge: every emotion magnified, every step a mile, the simple task of buying a goldfish becoming a quest through a labyrinth of onerous obstacles. Panahi masterfully figures Razieh’s experience of the world through POV shots and subjective sound, expressing the magnitude of how she feels hurt, longing, frustration, curiosity, fear, hope, and so much more. At the same time, he adroitly balances her perspective with a more objective one of the adult reality she finds herself intrepidly navigating. Razieh may not understand it, but Kiarostami and Panahi lucidly show, in an accumulation of small details, a society structured by commerce and inequality, in which a child’s problems are no less important or reflective of that society for being so relatively minor. Her brave negotiations with both adults and youth set into relief the gendered, classed, aged, and ethnic boundaries that affect everyone, and that make the retrieval of a banknote from a sewer grate more than merely a physical challenge. Panahi’s articulation of the economy of urban space and time, his use of color (not for nothing does Razieh visually rhyme with her coveted white-and-orange fish), and his employment of near-constant chatter on the soundtrack come together to create a world bursting with activity, authenticity, and meaning. Even when Razieh accomplishes her mission, Panahi makes sure we know there are so many more to tackle.