"The Wind Will Carry Us" (Language - Persian) (1999) - Movie Review

Styles of working out an art diverge in a wide form of ways with different creators handling it in a numerous ways. And when something like it needs to be implied in creating movies, the director goes for his own style or adapt to the already proven method. While taking up a well used and matured style may not seem as original, it would definitely make the work of creation less easy. Coming up with a whole new style, even though it appears to be the obvious choice for so many in this field, it takes lot of thinking to produce a material which will keep the audience engaged and curious throughout the period of the running time. “The Wind Will Carry Us”, directed by Abbas Kiarostami, is one such movie with such a unique style and elegance that keeps the audience comfortably restless and making them constantly ask questions in back of their mind.

In a long winding road, starts out a journey for an Engineer to a small village which has an old female expected to die in few days. The agenda for him is to capture the death ritual in his camera but unfortunately for him and fortunately for the female, she is getting better. The time flies on and he needs to learn the essence of life through the people, the animals, the village and the small lanes he makes friends of.

The movie is brutally natural in the making. The dialogues and scenes grab the viewer by their neck and drags on slowly and steadily into the small crooked lanes of the village. The movie is about the “Engineer” and the director desired to point it out in each and every frame. He achieved it by placing a fixed camera set on this character throughout the motion picture. He goes as much as of ignoring the rest of the characters in lot of scenes when the protagonist converses with someone.

The photography is one of the best I have seen lately and definitely would like to know the location of the village which they show as situated in a mountain with greeneries, reddish brown desert like sands, nice springs and carpets of crops nurtured in a single place. Editing followed out here is one of the techniques which have already been employed in the tamil movie “Uthiri Pookkal” of not letting the audience know the time frame of the events and it is worth the mention. The best part to mention the heights of directions is that the majority of the scenes take place in day time but the sequence before the final scene showing the transformation of darkness to slow birth of daylight depicting the awareness and realization of the protagonist of life is mountainous.

As per the earlier mentioning of the movie being extremely natural, it applies to the acting skills of the main character and also the rest of the cast as well. The movie has the brilliant performance and presentation of natural acting by Behzad Dorani.

As per the substance of the piece, there is tons of information implicit and explicit. The importance of education, friendship, guilt, responsibility and of all philosophy is mentioned throughout the movie in an artistic and subtle style. The poems form the spine of the movie and connect the dots of scattered concepts in the movie in a straight short line. It is another way of saying that all the answers for life are within themselves like there were in the Engineer’s head as poems but he never realized it till the end from the doctor.

This is definitely not a motion picture for people expecting something fast paced, descriptive and elaborate. It is a movie which provides the meeting of the real world with the real world through the work of art.