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The
Wind Will Carry Us
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Details
Suzhou
River
viewed
April 30, 2000 at AMC Kabuki
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Details
A capacity crowd greeted Abbas Kiarostami to the
Kabuki to receive the Festival's Akira Kurosawa award
for lifetime achieement in filmmaking. Before
Kiarostami alighted the stage, we were treated to his
most recent feature, The Wind Will Carry Us, a
film that was a less transparent but more
self-scrutinizing treatment of his ever-present theme:
the filmmaker's role in society. It's a lot less
self-indulgent than it sounds; I think there is hardly
another filmmaker who submits himself more to the
vagaries of the world, trying to depict in its whimsical
ways as accurately as it deserves to be. By
implementing less pseudo-documentary conceits (which
sometimes threaten to clutter his films at times),
Kiarostami produces a seamless work, one that never
hesitates to complicate its meaning even as it moves
effortlessly from scene to scene.
The plot is ostensibly about a trio of filmmakers who
journey to a remote hillside village to film the death
of a 100-year old woman. This may be Kiarostami's
metaphor for filming the end of a century -- but what
that entails becomes very unclear, especially as the
woman refuses to die. An immeasurable span of time
passes, much to the consternation of the office back in
Tehran, who continually pester the lead filmmaker on his
cell phone. The poor man must drive to the highest
hilltop every time in order to receive the calls.
Without any motivation other than to wait, the filmmaker
fights boredom by following a handful of characters in
the village, meandering from one encounter to another.
He occasionally makes a brilliant connection, such as
when he meets a ditch digger on the lonely, cell
phone-friendly hilltop, then finds the man's girlfriend
milking cows in a cave. These scenes are full of a
rare humanist beauty, as the filmmaker shares in the
secret of their love, offering lines of beautiful Farsi
poetry in exchange. It is fascinating that these
scenes take place in subterranean settings (man in a
ditch, woman in a cave), as if love and poetry must be
kept covered in this society. Also
fascinating is that neither of these lovers -- or
several other key characters in the film -- ever show
their faces. It is a daring move on Kiarostami's
part, one that clearly shows his understanding that
whatever doesn't need to be seen stays off the screen, a
masterful use of negative space that expands his frame.
If the ideas of the film are too slippery to be fully
grasped in one sitting, there is no question that the
stunning rural visuals have an immediate impact, from
the gradual appearance of an enormous tree on a hilltop
to the penultimate scene of the filmmaker reciting
poetry from the back of a doctor's motorbike as they
ride through wheatfields rolling in the wind. In
the end is a tentative acceptance of that wind, that it
will carry us to where we belong. In the meantime,
prefer the present; prefer the wind.*
That may be too tidy a summary of Kiarostami's
intentions; but you won't get anything more from
Kiarostami himself. During a brief and
unsatisfactory Q&A session shortly after receiving
his award, an untidy-looking audience member bellowed at
him: "Do you believe in the Qu'ran or in
existentialism?" Kiarostami's answer:
"What do my films tell you?"
-----
I left this hopeless line of inquiry to my second
screening of the day. Suzhou River,
directed by Lou Ye, is the first mainland Chinese film
to pattern itself after Tarantino and Wong Kar Wai.
We must ask, why now? But now seems as vital a
time as any for Chinese cinema to go hip, as it's poised
to enter the world economy through the WTO and
normalized trade relations with the U.S. The story
involves two men who love two separate women who happen
to look identical (played by the same actress, who by
the way is agonizingly cute). There's drugs,
there's pollution, there's killings and general
seediness. There's also blonde-haired mermaids, a
random but refreshing conceit borrowed from Wong and the
west. Most valuably, there's a romantic
earnestness that keeps the improbable story from sinking
-- such hip love-and-gun movies are a subgenre of Hong
Kong cinema that, sadly, could never be duplicated in
America. Hollywood films are too aggressive to be
cute, too bound by mechanics to be ethereal, too cynical
to believe in improbability. I have no problem
with seeing more of these Chinese urban fantasies,
because they'll always be a welcome alternative to the
irredeemable dreck we watch at home.
* I had plenty of time to practice this theory after
my double-feature. I found my car unlocked and a
pair of broken scissors in the driver's seat. Over
the next two hours I, with the help of the local police
station, found assistance through a locksmith. As
I waited for their arrival I entertained myself by
watching a couple of kids make prank calls to their
girlfriends on the station payphone.
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