Poetic journey
By Michael Wilmington, Movie Critic
Chicago Tribune
December 8, 2000
KIAROSTAMI'S 'WIND WILL CARRY US' A POETIC JOURNEY TO A REMOTE VILLAGE
Abbas Kiarostami's "The Wind Will Carry Us" is a film poem
of sometimes humbling beauty: a movie that opens up a new world to us --
in the mountains of Iranian Kurdistan -- with an enchanting freshness and
austerity of vision. It's about the collision of the sophisticated and
the primitive, the misunderstandings that ensue when a modern city man
is plunged into the ancient rhythms and rituals of an isolated mountain
village. And it's done in a breathtakingly assured, deceptively transparent
style that luminously blends sophistication and primitivism in nearly every
shot. Photo here
Yet will Western audiences value this movie as much as it deserves?
Or will they dismiss it as a film where "nothing happens?" Make
fun of its quiet epiphanies and earthy, impoverished milieu? I hope
not. Kiarostami is the modern Iranian master whose last film, "Taste
of Cherry," won the 1997 Grand Prize at Cannes yet remained a riddle
to some American critics and many audiences. "Cherry" was about
a man fixated on death, and so, in a less obvious way, is "The Wind
Will Carry Us."
In the beginning, "Wind" shows us a journey in which -- as
often in Kiarostami's movies -- the goal is mysterious. A nervous, bespectacled
city man in blue jeans drives a jeep up mountain roads on his way to a
remote village, Siah Dareh -- hewn like an Pueblo community out of the
hillside -- where a 100-year-old woman is dying and a strange and disturbing
set of funeral rites is set to follow her death. With him is a Tehran camera
crew secretly hired to record those rites. (The city man, called the Engineer,
is played by Behzad Dourani, the only professional actor in the film; the
rest of the cast are actual villagers of Siah Dareh.)
The Engineer never explains his purpose to the locals -- including a
young boy, Farzad, whom he turns, cunningly, into his local spy. Gradually,
they come to believe the Engineer is after buried treasure, perhaps because
he spends so much time fleeing up to the mountaintop cemetery, the only
place that his cell phone can function. As his visit stretches on -- with
the old woman still alive and the rites unfilmed -- his Tehran backers
grumble and his crew begins to revolt. But he also begins to see more closely
life in the "uneventful" village: the little local feuds, a romance
between a digger in the cemetery and a teenage girl, Farzad's troubles
at school with an essay about good and evil. Finally, there is crisis,
resolution -- and a camera to record it.
Such is "The Wind Will Carry Us" -- whose title comes from
a poem the Engineer recites to the gravedigger's girl as she sits in a
dark, cavernous basement, milking a cow for him. That poem is an expression
of anguished yearning from a young girl separated from her lover, seeing
him in every quiver of the earth, and finally crying out "The wind
will carry us!" It is a key poem in modern Iranian literature, written
by Iran's greatest female poet, Forough Farrokhzad (a liberal reformer
who died at 33 in a car crash), and the fact that most Iranian audiences
will recognize it immediately and Western audiences will not is one more
example of the cultural barriers that separate us -- and that movies can
erase.
When the Engineer recites the poem -- and tries to explain that its
writer was a woman just like the girl he is reciting it to -- he is, in
his mind, giving the girl something precious. But, significantly, he never
sees her -- just as we never see (on screen) the gravedigger, the camera
crew or the Tehran backer. The darkness is symbolic -- and death is the
main theme of "Taste of Cherry" and "Wind," both of
which use the terrifying image of men being buried alive. Yet, both films
end by honestly reaffirming life -- not in a tacky, cliched way but by
quietly immersing us in one shatteringly lovely image after another, evoking
those elemental emotions that the modern world's anxieties tend to blot
out: the sight of grass waving by the roadside, or a dry bone from the
cemetery cast into a churning stream. And, more than anything else, images
of people.
Kiarostami is the natural heir of the great traditions of Italian neo-realism
("Open City") and the Japanese domestic film ("Tokyo Story"),
just as Akira Kurosawa called him the natural successor to India's genius
naturalist, Satyajit Ray. Beginning his career as a documentarian who specialized
in films about children, Kiarostami has always excelled at suggesting "the
innocent eye" -- even if he has never attracted the large public that
greeted the work of his ex-assistant Jafar Panahi ("The White Balloon")
or pierced hearts like his other ex-assistant Bahman Ghobadi ("A Time
for Drunken Horses"). There's a greater irony and distance in his
own movies -- and an absolute refusal of easy sentimentality.
Instead, Kiarostami deals with terrible problems -- poverty, oppression,
ignorance and exploitation -- in a low-key voice full of empathy and ambiguity.
Life's miseries and joys often lie clasped in a painful embrace. Yearning
is universal, death and life among the only constants. But sometimes, in
the darkness, like the intrusive Engineer, we may hear a snatch of poetry,
a cry of yearning. At that moment, as the poet wrote, the wind will carry
us, too. 'THE WIND WILL CARRY US'
FOUR STARS
Directed, edited and written by Abbas Kiarostami; photographed by Mahmoud
Kalari; music by Payman Yazdanian; poem "The Wind Will Carry Us"
by Forough Farrokhzad; produced by MK2 productions: Marin Karmitz (France),
Kiarostami (Iran). A New Yorker Films release; opens Friday at The Music
Box Theatre. Running time: 1:58. No MPAA rating (family).
THE CAST
The Engineer .......... Behzad Dourani
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