To see this broken world through the eyes of kids is to see disappointment through the lens of innocence and hope. It means defining and understanding things on the fly – unburdened by history or preconceptions. It is a fresh perspective that pricks our own biases and gloom. For the same reasons, children can be critical characters in movies, a counter narrative that flips our points of view.Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi — most known for his acclaimed 1998 drama Children of Heaven, which was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards — is no stranger to the charms of children. Majidi, however, is a stranger to the city of Mumbai, where his latest drama, Beyond the Clouds, is set. As a result, he is late.Mumbai, perhaps more than any other city in this world, suffers from narrative fatigue. Numerous films, spanning different genres, have been made on it. But equally important, two critically acclaimed films, Salaam Bombay and Slumdog Millionaire, have accomplished a Majidi-like feat: humanising the metropolis through the experiences of children. And that was long ago. Slumdog Millionaire is more than ten years old; Salaam Bombay will turn 30 later this year.Beyond the Clouds opens to Aamir (Ishaan Khatter), a drug peddler who wants to secure a stable future for himself and his sister, Taara (Malavika Mohanan). But Aamir is a pawn in a bigger game comprising informers, pimps and gangsters. When Tara bludgeons her rapist Akshi (Gautam Ghose), she goes to jail on the count of attempted murder, and he is admitted to a local hospital. Taara’s acquittal depends on Akshi; if he survives, then so does she. It is one of the several instances in the movie where the fates of two different people – the perpetrator and the victim, the bystander and the griever – collide. It is perhaps Majidi’s way of stripping them of labels, seeing them as people, and understanding their extent of empathy and compassion – in essence, their humanity.Aamir loathes Akshi, but he has to keep him alive. So he buys medicines for him, spends nights at the hospital. He eventually meets Akshi’s mother and two daughters who speak Tamil but not Hindi (the language that Aamir knows); they communicate in broken English instead. Taara meets a young mother (Tannishtha Chatterjee) in jail who is serving time for murdering her husband, and her son Chotu who has lived in the prison since he was three months old. Aamir’s relationship with Akshi’s daughters, marked by tenderness and tomfoolery, mirrors Taara’s bond with Chotu. These relationships aren’t familial, just human.But the main problem with Majidi’s film is not its themes but its storytelling. For a drama set in Mumbai, Beyond the Clouds doesn’t find new gateways to the city. The settings – the rundown hospital, the seedy brothel, the overcrowded jail – seem familiar and fail to evoke new feelings. Even the bare bones of the story, centred on drugs, prostitution and duplicity, are common to many Mumbai films. Consequently, Beyond the Clouds feels like a film that you have seen and heard before. That doesn’t make it shoddy; it simply makes it insipid, impeding our emotional involvement with the movie.Sometimes empathy can be a formula in itself; the paths to it well-known and well-trodden. In such a case, it is not difficult to outguess the plot and characters’ motivations. Majidi does succeed in springing a few surprises but, for the most part, Beyond the Clouds is the kind of film where the audience is ahead of the story. The film’s emotional truths, consequently, feel blunted.This would have been a tougher film to endure were it not for its lead, Khatter, who, for a brief while, turns this jaded material original. Cast as a child artist in Vaah! Life Ho To Aisi and an extra in Udta Punjab, Beyond the Clouds can be considered Khatter’s debut, where he finds his own vocabulary to express Aamir’s anger, anguish and fleeting moments of love – a quality that this film lacks.Cinematographer Anil Mehta, similarly, is another high point of this film; his camerawork effectively conveys the restlessness of the city. It also helps that Beyond the Clouds is shot on real locations, helping Mehta capture its chaos and noise unfiltered. But these are minor consolations in a film that struggles to explore itself in new compelling ways.