The Wind Will Carry Us (1999): Kiarostami in the country

The theme of the stressed-out, materialistic big city professional finding renewal and redemption in a small town is one mainstream cinema goes back to time and time again, and it usually makes my teeth itch. If big-name American directors really found Midwestern small towns as life-affirming as they claim to, then Hollywood would be located in Missouri. It’s pandering, frankly, which is why it’s so unexpected to see it turn up in the work of a director as free from commercial pressures as Abbas Kiarostami. What isn’t a surprise is that it works far, far better here.

Criterion UK’s new Blu-Ray release of Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us sees the late Iranian director at a crossroads – aptly, considering the number of driving scenes in his movies. His last film of the 20th century, it’s also his last before he adopted digital technology and started making confrontationally minimalist films. Those films are central to his legend, and I’d hate to downplay them. The best of them suggest an alternative path forward for cinema as a whole, one where digital technology liberated artists to produce wholly new images and narratives. Equally, just as it’s important to know that Picasso learned how to paint ‘properly’ before inventing Cubism, there’s something about seeing the rich, golden 35mm cinematography of The Wind Will Carry Us that vindicates works like Five. 

It’s also hugely important to the above-mentioned theme. Whereas Hollywood films about small-town charm tend to ladle on the star power and glossy production values, The Wind Will Carry Us is a film about the slow charms of rural life that matches its location in slowness and charm. Kiarostami’s characteristic use of off-screen space is deployed here for gently absurd comedy, most obviously in the case of the village ditch-digger who we only encounter as a voice drifting up from the hole he’s digging. Usually, Kiarostami’s focus on what he won’t show is a way of addressing what he can’t show. The Wind Will Carry Us isn’t directly about the role of women in Iran, as some of his later films will be, but it doesn’t ignore them either. The title comes from the work of the groundbreaking Iranian female poet and film-maker Forough Farrokhzad, while a conversation with an elderly woman about what she delicately terms the “third work” – after domestic work and employment – reveals an unmistakable sexual subtext that can still get through at a U certificate.

Criterion have previously released a number of Kiarostami’s films, including his final film 24 Frames. The ones that shed the most light on The Wind Will Carry Us, though, are the ones in his Koker Trilogy, which Criterion put out as a box set after years of them being frustratingly hard to see. Kiarostami first went to the Iranian village of Koker to make his landmark film Where is the Friend’s House?, a film whose visual motifs are still recognisable here. (He loves a winding path up a hill) When Koker was hit by a devastating earthquake soon after, he returned to make Life and Nothing More…, a testament to the region’s strength as well as a self-reflexive piece about his own role as a director. The process of making Life and Nothing More…, in turn, prompted the final film of the trilogy, Through the Olive Trees, which is solely about the complexities of filming one particular scene from the previous film.

Describing the Koker trilogy like that makes it sound like a director gradually disappearing up his own fundament, or at the very least something very complicated and postmodern that you have to be very clever to understand. But Kiarostami’s films are always quiet, humane and graceful – often you don’t realise how much ground they’ve covered until the end credits roll and you think back over what you’ve just watched. His knack for a simple, eloquent visual metaphor is certainly present in The Wind Will Carry Us, but the reflections on fiction and directing are more subtextual. We can see an echo of Kiarostami’s life-changing experiences in Koker in the story, which makes Behzad, the protagonist, into a gently self-mocking self-portrait. It makes the film richer, but it isn’t what makes it good. Part of the value of Kiarostami is that he’s an experimental film-maker whose films reveal their charms immediately. You don’t need a film studies degree or a box set of the Koker films to fall in love with The Wind Will Carry Us, you just need an open heart and a pair of eyes.

That said, a good range of extras do improve things, and this is the best set Criterion have offered in some time. There is a special feature devoted to Kiarostami’s poetry – like Farrokhzad, he had another career as a poet – which is unexpected and offers a more rounded sense of him as an artist. There is also an insightful French-language interview with the director from 2002, in which he holds forth on everything from women’s rights to the reason why he hates one particular shot of trees in this movie. Finally, there’s A Week With Kiarostami, a really charming feature-length documentary by Yuji Mohara which covers the making of this film while echoing Kiarostami’s own style. As with the film itself, it comes across as a show of spiritual kinship with the subject matter. There is a very amusing bit dealing with a shot of an apple rolling down a chute, a shot which has several crew members wondering why they’re devoting so much time to it. But Mohara devotes a lot of time to it as well, as if he’s making the case for it being important in its simplicity. And when you watch the main feature, you’d have to agree: that’s the best shot of an apple rolling down a chute in cinema history.

Graham’s Archive – The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)