The wind will carry us
The movie ends with an extremely sappy monologue of a doctor about the beauty of life. While I love musings about life and death, in this case I felt like it ruined the extreme subtlety of the film a little bit. By making its intentions explicit and summarizing the whole film in a few words, it’s literally destroying all these little details that one has to piece together beforehand to try to understand the film. All of a sudden it’s been served on a silver plate after all. Odd.
Until then, “The wind will carry us” is wonderful. Whenever I watch a Kiarostami, I am doubtful of whether I would like it. This is mostly because I find all his films to be very different, and liking “Copie conforme” or “Close-up” will tell you nothing about whether you will like “The wind will carry us”. But with every single Kiarostami, without fail, it will take me 20 minutes to figure out what is going on and by the time I got into the story, I would be so immersed into the world Kiarostami is presenting that I can’t stop until I saw it all the way until the end, I go from “what the heck am I watching?” to “I want to see more!” This effect completely caught me by surprise when I saw “Close-up” and now I feel reminded of it.
Surprisingly, “The wind will carry us” is also the funniest Kiarostami I have seen so far. Nothing in the scene is explicitly funny, but his encounters with the villagers leads to a lot of deadpan humor; his dialogue with the pregnant woman (who then gave birth to the child) is the best example, and his repeated driving out to get cell phone connection becomes increasingly funny with repetition. While the old woman gets better and better, the film also becomes more and more uplifting even though the main character is getting more and more frustrated. He mistreats that poor tortoise by flipping it over, but the tortoise turns back on his feet. (Go tortoise!) Kiarostami’s love for the simpler things in life is heart-warming, as is this story of a man’s slow redemption. Nothing in the film is particularly meaningful – neither the restless life of the main character nor the boring life of the villagers, but it is probably life itself that is meaningful.
Apparently people from Iran don’t really like to watch Kiarostami’s films. I can see where that is coming from, Chinese people are typically not that into the Zhang Yimou/Chen Kaige etc. group either. After all, Kiarostami’s films are sooooo slow and they are always set in poor villages. But as a foreigner, I love all four of the Kiarostami films I saw, including this one.