It’s mid-September, and this morning while walking my son to school I realized the huge maple tree we pass on the way has started changing. It’s no longer bright green, and the grass around it is already covered in red and brown leaves. I felt a bit panicked as I usually do when observing the passage of time. A demonstration of decaying life, a reminder that all things change and die, and that nothing stays the same.
The struggle with facing death, whether it’s the literal loss of life or a metaphor for change, is of course a common theme in all art, as it is a fundamental human fear (unless you’re enlightened, which I am not). I can think of countless movies that deal beautifully with mortality, but one of my favourites is Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us (1999).
What to say about Kiarostami? This quote from the master himself tells us a lot about his style of film-making:
“I believe in a type of cinema that gives greater possibilities and time to its audience. A half-created cinema, an unfinished cinema that attains completion through the creative spirit of the audience, so resulting in hundreds of films.”
The Wind Will Carry Us is a great example of cinema that “attains completion through the creative spirit of the audience”. It lacks a conventional narrative, though at a high-level it’s about a group of filmmakers who travel from Tehran to the Kurdish village of Siah Dareh to document a folk ritual following the death of an elderly woman.
The thing is, the old woman isn’t dead yet, so they have to essentially….wait for her to die. And during that time, the main character, Behzad (Behzad Dourani), wanders around the village and surrounding countryside, observing and befriending the locals. Behzad gets daily status updates on the old woman from a little boy named Farzad (Farzad Sohrabi) who becomes his tour guide.
As Behzad waits, he receives several calls from his producer in Tehran, who is hounding him for updates, and it is comically difficult for him to take these calls because the village has zero cell reception.
My favourite scene is when Behzad and a village doctor ride through the hills on a moped:
This scene ends with Behzad and the doctor reciting lines from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyait:
They tell me the other world is as beautiful as a houri (angel) from heaven!
Yet I say that the juice of the vine is better.
Prefer the present to those fine promises.
Even a drum sounds melodious from afar
Behzad is caught between his desire to complete his project and the urge to stay present and revel in the quiet beauty of the village.
By the time the old woman finally dies at the end of the film, Behzad has completely lost interest in the funeral ceremony. He gives up on documenting the death ritual in favour of photographing the village women on their way to the funeral. Maybe the doctor was right - we don’t need to wait for the afterlife because God can be found in the mundane, beautiful present.
Rent The Wind Will Carry Us on iTunes or borrow it from your local library. Enjoy!