THE WIND WILL CARRY US (Bad ma ra khabad born)
Reviewed by Harvey Karten New Yorker Films Director: Abbas Kiarostami Writer: Abbas Kiarostami, idea by Mahmoud Ayedin Cast: Behzad Dourani, the Inhabitants of the Village of Siah Dareh
Political hacks who are appointed by repressive governments are not generally known to be intellectuals, so that if writers, or playwrights, or filmmakers want to get something critical past the censors, they'd better disguise their allegorical works as non-political. A good example of Jean Anouilh's 1943 adaptation of Sophocles' tragedy, "Antigone," about a young woman who rebels against her uncle, the king. Assumed by Nazi officials to be simply a retelling of an old legend, this French drama was known by every intelligent person in the audience to be critical of the German occupation during the War. When a oppressive theocracy was set up in Iran during the 1960s there was some question about the role of cinema and how the movies could fit in with the fundamentalist Islamic society. Abbas Kiarostami has so far been able to pass muster with the censors who presumably consider his films of no threat to the regime.
However Kiarostami's latest work, "The Wind Will Carry Us" (whose title is taken from a poem about the beauty of nature and the wonder of life), can readily be taken as a parable about the regime currently in power in Iran, but its political meaning is dwarfed by a more philosophic meditation about nothing less than life and death. At the same time the filmmaker even deprecates his own arrogance by setting up a character who can probably be taken for his stand-in.
This slow-moving, deadly serious morality tale which in a stretch could remind theater-lovers of a Christian parable, "The Road to Damascus," has been filmed on location in the Kurdistani village of Siah Dareh, built into a mountain 450 miles from Tehran and about 450 years from modern technological civilization. A man known simply as "The Engineer" (as though this were a German expressionist drama) is traveling with a crew of two by Land Rover to this remote area presumably to look for treasure, or at least that's the impression he gives to the villagers. His squad is never shown, allowing photographer Mahmoud Kalari to focus our attention quite strictly on the Engineer, particularly on his ambiguities and complexities. A tall, lean fellow dressed informally in blue jeans, a plaid shirt, and fashionable eyeglasses, he is welcomed by the villagers almost as though he were the Ayatollah himself, despite their lack of information on his mission--which is, actually, not to look for treasure but to record an ancient ritual set to take place when an old woman dies. Unbenownst to the locale, he is looking out for his own career in Tehran (though we're not clear how the photos he takes of a funeral procession can be so important to his employers). Despite his self-absorption, he seems also to have a genuine interest in the townspeople, and regularly pumps a young schoolboy, Farzad, for information.
The film is as spare and as studied as previous works of Kiarostami, such as his best-known "A Taste of Cherry," about a man contemplating suicide. The audience gets a good look at the women of the village, most of whom are old, with one in particular who has no problem shooting her mouth off when an auto's fumes are polluting her tea salon while another, have just given birth to her tenth child, is back at work on the farm one day later.
The village, ostensibly not atypical of the areas in which many Iranians live and eke out a living, is backward both physically and politically. The cell phone brought into the town by the engineer might just be the first such contraption of its kind ever seen by the people--who may be alien to the concept of telephones altogether. Politically, the government seems to have buried the burg in its medieval ways, symbolized plainly and literally by a man who is digging a hole to set up telecommunications (or so he says) but who, in an accident is buried alive and rescued just in time, taken to a hospital for an administration of oxygen--which in Kiarostami's allegory is what the whole country needs to sweep away the dominance of fundamentalism. Even the young girlfriend of the digger, from whom the Engineer mooches a jug of milk taken directly from her cow, is living in a cave not unlike the cavity described by Plato--a residence devoid of love, beauty and truth. As for the central character played by Behzad Dourani, the filmmaker leaves one loose end untied. While the Engineer may choose to be of more service to the villagers than he had been so far, he also unethically takes pictures of the funeral procession despite the feeling of the townspeople that photographs are a violation of privacy and respect for the dead.
"The Wind Will Carry Us" is loaded with metaphoric baggage, a somber, heavy, piece slow to the point of ponderousness. The film moves along like the turtle spotted by the Engineer moving along at its own pace, kicked gently on its back only to right itself up and continue its daily journey to nowhere because any sort of life is preferable to death. This is a film not simply for an audience of foreign-film enthusiasts but for a highly specialized cadre of buffs who will appreciate the work as an effective antidote to the current crop of MTV-ish, special effects action-adventure creations that dominate the American screen.
Not Rated. Running time: 118 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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