Wind fall

Abbas Kiarostami will carry us

by Peter Keough

THE WIND WILL CARRY US, written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami. With Behzad Dourani and the inhabitants of the village of Siah Dareh. A New Yorker Films release.

While the Land of the Free polishes Oscars for the likes of such pap as Pay It Forward, fundamentalist Iran continues to explore the limits of cinema and the meaning of life on the screen. After a year blowing about festivals and exclusive runs, Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us finally drifts into town for a two-week stay at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. It's not the best film by Kiarostami. It's just the best film of the year, even though it was made in 1999.

The terrain will be familiar to fans of the director's masterful Taste of Cherry (1996) or the increasingly self-reflexive trilogy that ends with Through the Olive Trees (1994), but it's still inexhaustibly rewarding. A Jeep tools through the desert in a long shot, and the unseen passengers squabbling inside about directions to the remote Kurdish village that is their destination sound like characters from an updated Waiting from Godot. As is often the case in films from Iran, a child is there to guide them; young Farzad (Farzad Sohrabi) leads them to the village, a lovely, otherworldly spot that nestles in a valley like an ornate pastry, and to his aunt's house, where they will stay for their undisclosed mission ("Tell them we're here for treasure!" they giggle).

Only one of their number, however, is really seen in the movie -- it's a running joke that the others are always off screen sleeping late or sampling the local strawberries. The wry but enigmatic Engineer (Behzad Dourani) has a more hectic schedule. He tours the village with Farzad, noting its shimmering whiteness ("Why is it called Black Alley?" is one of his unanswered questions), the paradisal lushness of the surrounding countryside, the alluring mystery of the black-clad women. Daylight suffuses everything; only one brief shot takes place at night, and only one in darkness, and that casts a light of its own.

But the Engineer is too distracted to savor the grace and serenity. Everybody seems to know him, but he doesn't seem to know anyone, and he's preoccupied by the condition of the ailing old woman who lives in the house with the blue window. Every day he badgers Farzad for updates, but he also shows an occasional interest in the boy's schoolwork and family troubles and shares with him snatches of poetry, surprised that the little rustic recognizes the odd line or two.

Invariably, these asides are interrupted by the ringing of the Engineer's cell phone, and in search of higher ground and better reception he leaps into his Jeep and scurries to a nearby hilltop, where he has nagging conversations with family members or business associates -- and though it's not clear what's up, it seems that things are going badly and time is running out. The hilltop turns out to be a graveyard, complete with, if not a Shakespearean gravedigger, at least a local laborer shoveling out a ditch for a telecommunications project (as one of the locals points out, the Engineer's specialty is telecommunications). He chats with this man -- who's also unseen -- about life and death and love (he glimpses the man's girlfriend slipping away after delivering his lunch, one of the film's elusive, incandescent glints of eroticism). Later he talks with Farzad's teacher (a handsome young fellow, disclosed in one of Kiarostami's subtle shots to be crippled and on crutches), and gradually it emerges that the Engineer and his friends are in town to witness a funeral rite and record it on film.

For what purpose? Perhaps metaphorical. As the old tradition dies, a new world emerges from its graves. Or perhaps the meaning is more personal, more mystical, more like an eschatological Ingmar Bergman allegory, as suggested by the allusions to strawberries and milk. The village, though a real one (and its inhabitants are played by the actual villagers), shimmers like the landscape of a dream; any moment it seems that the Engineer will awaken into some revelation.

Will it be invoked by the crusty local doctor, who like the old-timer at the end of Taste of Cherry counsels the Engineer to seize the evanescent glory of the world while he can? Or by Farzad, who asks the Engineer for help with an exam question about the fate of the good and evil souls on Judgment Day? The film's most evocative moment, and now one of the most stirring in cinema, comes when the Engineer descends into a cellar where a young girl waits with a lantern. As she milks a cow, he recites the poem that gives The Wind Will Carry Us its title, and it becomes clear that Kiarostami has not only re-created a real world but evoked the visionary one that lies beneath.