Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Gary The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Tejas Nair Never have I seen such a topic on-reel. And Majid Majidi does it with finesse, cooked up with traces of sentiments and etching up emotions into a beautiful layer of life lesson.The Willow Tree talks about a taciturn, blind professor and his lives, before and after a surgery that changes his life forever. Before, he is calm and loving. He loves his family & work. Then comes life values and when God puts him on test, things go pumping and wrecking. What brought luck to him, snatches all his glorious memories and turns him into something he never thought he'd become.The plot goes heavy on the darker and duller side towards the end, depicting how life can turn upside down, if we slip the path once. Chiefly, it talks about the dangers of life that we want or never ever dreamed of. Lots of thing depicted, lots of things to learn, this film is a perfect blend of life and interpretation. It cannot be debated as to why the divine power creates things as they are and this story gives us a promising insight. Cast is so beautifully active, the message is brightly conveyed. Music is very good.BOTTOM LINE: Majidi is a master and as like all his films, this one is another feather in his hat.Profanity/Vulgarity/Sex/Porn: No | Violence: Mediocre | Gore/Alcohol/Smoking: No | Gore: Mediocre

martonejames I have been deeply moved by "The Willow Tree," which I saw this evening as part of an Iranian film series at the Freer Gallery in Washington DC. I am not sure that any Western culture could ever produce something as beautiful, but I hope all westerners see it. It has impressed positively and permanently. I was most moved by the scene of the hero coming back to Iran, and seeing his mother, and then again, when the mother comes to his house after his wife has left. The most beautiful, was our hero looking for the papers in the pond, and finding that special one. The ending is magnificent, as it allows us to ponder which is better, to continue blind, or be blessed again with sight. But in either case he seems condemned. Thank you. James

Carl Cinema began as a purely visual medium. The shock and fright that the Lumière brothers caused in their virgin audience came about because seeing the world through the lens of a camera is like seeing for the first time—witness Dziga Vertov's 1929 paean to the new medium, Man With a Movie Camera, and you get a sense of this fascination. Thus, film is perfectly suited to director Majid Majidi's exploration in The Willow Tree of a blind man regaining his sight. After a quietly foreboding passage of voice-over, the movie opens its eyes on a scene of sylvan innocence, with a father and his young daughter racing sticks down a stream. We soon learn that the father, Youssef, a university professor, is blind. At home, his wife, Roya, sits and translates pages of texts into Braille for him. When he sits down to read them in his courtyard, a sudden gust of wind blows them away and Roya has to scramble across the garden to retrieve them, while Youssef grasps desperately at whatever he can feel near him. He is cared for, he is loved, and loves in return but we are given a sense of his dependence, his powerlessness in the face of nature's occasional rushes. Having flown to Paris to treat a possible cancer under his eye, he undergoes a cornea transplant that should restore his sight, which he lost when he was 8 years old. In a tremulously powerful section of the movie, Youssef impatiently peels back the padding around his eyes to the shocking sensation of light. Still with the carefully lifted feet of a blind man, he pads excitedly into the hospital corridor as a single tear of blood falls from his still- scarred eyes. It is a moment of subtle horror—after all, a new sense is terrifying. The Willow Tree is unrelenting cinema. It challenges our notion of perception and gives us the visceral rush of seeing as though for the first time. When Youssef returns to Iran he is greeted by a crowd of family and friends. In a scene that will stay with me for a very long time, the soundtrack drops away as Youssef looks at these faces without recognition—which one is Roya? Is it the beautiful young woman with the video camera? Youssef hopes so. And there is the tragedy—with all this renewed sensation, the reference points of the past need to be realigned, the world which satisfies the other senses might not satisfy the eyes, and in that moment at the airport, Majidi brings to bear both the revelatory joy of the new and the plummeting realisation of how much was lacking before. As Youssef, Parviz Parastui is astonishing. It is his performance, as well as that of Afarin Obeisi as his mother, that lifts The Willow Tree above anyone reproaching it with sentimentality. It is a deeply religious film, in the best sense of the word—a moral fable that is not moralistic.

corrosion-2 This film can be described as a companion piece to Majidi's highly acclaimed Color of Paradise. In that movie, in which a father saw his blind son as a burden and not as a blessing, we (& eventually the father) began to "see" the world from the blind boy's view and in doing so saw a much richer, meaningful world. Here, the characters of the father and the son are embodied in a single person: Yusef who after 38 years of being blind regains his sight. What he sees, however, is quite different to what he "saw" as a blind man, and not necessarily more beautiful or rewarding. Majidi takes the viewer to a higher, more spiritual world and in doing so creates another masterpiece. Majidi's movies are visually stunning and have such a profound effect on the viewer that when we leave the cinema, we see the world in a different light. Parviz Parastoui, one of the best actors in the Iranian cinema and theatre, is outstanding as Yusef. Also worth mentioning is Mahmood Kelari's exceptional photography. As in all Majidi films, there are scenes which will stay with you long after the movie is over.