The Wind Will Carry Us

Please allow me to start with a cliche. The films of Abbas Kiarostami -- "Like Someone in Love" and "Certified Copy" are his two latest -- contain multitudes. They deal with universal themes, they can be tragic, they're socially relevant, they're spiritual, they're political -- and they're funny, too. That's something you think about during "The Wind Will Carry Us," a vaguely plotted picture that seems to be about a filmmaker documenting a mourning process (the character is named "Engineer," and his job is never actually made explicit.) Kiarostami never gives you what you're expecting. After three somber features about earthquakes, life and death, he came out with "Wind," which spends a significant portion of its time on a halfway-comedic routine that follows the Engineer up and down hills while he tries to find some cell phone service.

While he's trying to make those calls, we often see him talking to someone -- but we don't see the person he's talking to. This is one of Kiarostami's trademark visual flourishes: more things happen off-screen in his movies than happen on-screen. He asks the audience to fill in the gaps themselves. One of the dominant images in the film is the camera-as-mirror: our main character gazes into the frame, staring, sometimes shaving. It'd be easy to suggest that Kiarostami's saying his films are trying to depict the lives of the average person who'd watch them, but there's something more mystical going on here. It's like he's looking to us to finish the story for him.

There are only two extra features here accompanying the film, but they're both worth the price of the whole disc on their own. First up is an audio commentary with Jonathan Rosenbaum (who has been championing Kiarostami for decades now) and Iranian film scholar Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa. The two are clearly big fans of the picture, and they speak rapturously about it throughout the entire running time, offering tidbits about Kiarostami's career; informing us of social contexts that enrich the film; and generally showing that they've done their homework.

Following that is a video of a 90 minute conversation with Kiarostami himself, moderated by Richard Pena and conducted (at Indiana University) earlier this year. For fans of the director, this is as much of a draw as the upgrade of the film itself: Kiarostami goes into deep detail about both his early films and the restrictive social conditions that forced them to be made in the manner that we were. Earlier we mentioned the startlingly profound use of off-screen space. In this interview, he essentially tells us the exact reasons that he's had to leave some many things in his films unsaid.

"The Wind Will Carry Us"
Blu-ray
$39.98
cohenfilmcollection.net