The Wind Will Carry Us

viewed August 30, 2000 at the Lincoln Plaza   Full Details

After another viewing (this time with a close friend to bounce ideas off), this film left me more confounded than I was two hours before.  In the four months I've had to reflect on it I had thought my understanding of it had grown so that my memory of it had swelled to something grand and truly sublime, some kind of a brilliant millenial statement about humankind's relationship to others and to technology.  Seeing it again, I felt like I was getting it as it was going along, but then -- boom -- it's over, and I'm like, that was it?

Reading what I wrote below makes me feel justified in my confusion -- I think my previous summary, while somewhat apt, is far too pat for its own good.  It doesn't get into the details of the seamlessness of the work, how naturally the protagonist moves from one interaction with a villager to another, weaving a tapestry of social interactions -- that may be the film's finest achievement.  Maybe that's what is supposed to be paid attention to -- because this time I was trying to really find out for certain what the visitors to the village were after, and what is going on with the lead at the end.  Needless to say, I didn't get my answers.

And now, I'm back in the real world, and I want to see this movie again.  My imagination and my desires are shaping it back to what I want it to be: a naturalistic, well-crafted, meandering narrative with wonderful, playfully insightful bits of dialogue and even better cinematography.  I could be completely hoodwinked.  This film has generated its share of detractors, trying to deflate the hype.  Those who attack Kiarostami say he's exhausted his directorial conceits (which I mention below) so that they've become cliches even before they've had a chance to influence other filmmakers.  That thought disturbs me, but I don't agree with it -- I think we're just beginning to get ready to incorporate these styles in American film, and what a great period that will be, when we are patient and caring enough to make films like this one.  For sure, criticism should be leveled at this guy, and I'd love to do it as much as anyone, but I'd have to see it again if I'm to come up with substantial criticism.  It's just as easy to have criticism come out of your ass than praise.   

viewed April 30, 2000 at the AMC Kabuki

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 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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