| THE WIND WILL CARRY US Director: Abbas Kiarostami " I don't leave the blank spaces just so people have something to finish. I leave them blank so people can fill them according to how they think and what they want. In my mind, the abstraction we accept in other forms of art -- painting, sculpture, music, poetry -- can also enter the cinema. I feel cinema is the seventh art, and supposedly it should be the most complete since it combines the other arts." Abbas Kiarostami from Film Comment Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami is much more interested in the simplicity that the poetry of cinema can achieve than in telling a plot driven story. He has been quoted as saying that narrative filmmaking is dead. And while this statement is nothing new (40 years ago Alain Resnais and Michaelangelo Antonioni said virtually the same thing) it’s good to see a director try to expand the language of cinema. But lest you construe his statements as a marketing campaign you need only to see this film to realize that he’s not in it for the money. In fact, even the art house crowd may have a tough time fully accepting Kiarostami’s latest film. But not because it’s complex. On the surface, it’s a simple film; instead, the complexity comes when the audience tries to decipher what he is trying to say. The Wind Will Carry Us is rather ambiguous and seems to be about nothing so much as two weeks in the life of a man waiting for an old woman to die. Because of this, some critics have labeled this film an example of ‘the cinema of nothing happens.’ A man, simply called The Engineer (Behzad Dourani) -- with a crew of three men -- arrives in a remote pueblo style Kurdish village to await the death of an older woman so they can witness an ancient mourning ceremony. For two weeks not much happens while they wait except the Engineer is befriended and led around the village by a small boy. The film has a good amount of subtle humor. The biggest gag being that every time the Engineer’s cell phone rings he has to go to higher ground to get a good signal. So he rushes to his Land Rover and drives to the highest point, which happens to be a cemetery. Each time he is there, he strikes up a conversation with a man who -- for no apparent reason -- is digging a hole deep into the earth. Kiarostami shows us people of the village (all playing themselves) doing their daily routine, which includes working, eating and occasionally communicating. And he emphasizes, as well as anyone, the people's relationship to the landscape. Often characters will walk out of frame and the camera will just sit there and gaze at the mountains, the valleys, the trees or parts of the village. The film seems to deal with a few metaphors and it pivots on two rituals. One is the funeral ceremony we never see and the other is the daily trip that the Engineer takes to the cemetery to receive his cell phone calls. (Could there be a message here about cell phone use?) The formal aspects are interesting too. Besides the landscape and the mazelike village Kiarostami adds a few humorous visual motifs; some of which are repeated so often that they lose their comical edge. He also creates an off-screen space by presenting a number of characters that are only heard but never seen. This ploy -- also not new (Mizoguchi dd wonders with this technique) -- encourages the audience to use their imagination as they would while reading a book. The problem with The Wind Will Carry Us is that by the end it is neither involving nor gratifying. Most of Kiarostami’s other films have a similar slow pace but at least create a tension that leads to a satisfactory if not amazing conclusion. Here he stays ambiguous as if he himself has forgotten where it is supposed to go and instead just decided to film life as it happens with a few philosophical ideas and visual metaphors thrown in for good measure. He is quoted above as saying that he wants the audience to interpret in their own way and while this is theoretically commendable it doesn't always work. There is a sense of relatively that applies to each film. And all great directors -- including Kiarostami -- sometimes misfire. And using the excuse that it's all about abstractions and filling blanks isn't always acceptable. - Matt Langdon |