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No Cause To Get Carried Away By Ponderous 'Wind'
The New York Post
July 28, 2000

Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian writer-director of "The Wind Will Carry Us," is the undisputed critical darling of the international film festival circuit. This film received the usual praise as a "masterpiece" at Toronto last year.

However, with this poetic but tedious and all but plotless film, it's hard not to wonder if some of his ardent cinéaste fans are seeing qualities in his work that aren't really there.

Or maybe they are motivated by the kind of high-brow snobbery that mistakenly confuses a glacial pace, contempt for plot and a willful, self-indulgent inaccessibility with profundity.

Certainly, Kiarostami has furthered his reputation as the most "serious" of the new wave of Iranian filmmakers by giving gnomic, avant-gardist interviews about "the end of storytelling."

He is, it must be said, a wonderful photographer: "The Wind Will Carry Us" is filled with gorgeous images of rural life in a remote Kurdish village - you can almost smell the livestock.

And it's fascinating, in an (airbrushed) anthropology documentary Discovery Channel sort of way. But it's also so relentless in its lack of story that you find yourself making mental to-do lists or even nodding off. And its 118 minutes feel twice as long.

Although you're given very few clues as to what is actually going on in the film, a man (Behzad Tourani) who seems to be some kind of film producer - though he is referred to only as "the engineer" - arrives at a sun-bleached, hillside village with a two-man crew (you hear them speak, but you never see their faces).

There, assisted by an 11-year-old boy, they wait for a 100-year-old woman to die, in the belief that her death will be followed by some kind of exotic local ritual involving self-mutilation.

But the old woman's death isn't as imminent as the engineer believed, so he spends most of his time hanging around in the village and bothering the 11-year-old boy, who wants to work on his exams.

Occasionally, his cell phone rings. To answer the call, he has to drive up to the cemetery on the hill, where a man you never see is digging a mysterious, deep hole in the ground.

Again and again, the engineer drives up the hill to take a call. The first three or four times you see him take the route, you're struck by the gorgeousness of the golden wheat fields. Then it becomes a bore.

Of course, the point is that the engineer, in his hiking boots and denim shirt, is an urban, modern fellow.

And the film is largely a vague, opaque meditation about such a man's inability to adjust to the slower rhythms of a traditional rural community, nature, the seasons, etc.