The Wind Will Carry Us
|
List Price: Our Price: $18.49 You Save: $11.46 (38%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Canada
Movie Reviews of The Wind Will Carry Us
Movie Review: The New World and the Old
Summary: 5 Stars
Plot summary: Film crew travels to remote village to document a death ritual. Once in the village, however, they find the deathly ill woman has not perished yet and so they settle in and wait. Each day they enquire about the old womans health and each day the news is different. The focus is on one member of the crew and how he slowly acclimates himself to the villagers, to nature, and to time as he waits for an event that may or may not occur. This is my second Abbas Kiorastami film. I recently saw Close Up and after seeing this one I want to see all of his films. Kiorastami is a film maker for people who want something unique. Hollywood is all about stating the obvious and Kiorastami is all about subtlety. Most films work by speeding things up and meeting expectations but Kiorastami works by slowing things down and subverting expectations. In CLOSE UP an out-of-work man with a family to support pretends to be a famous director and befriends a wealthy family who believes he truly is the director. As time passes the family begins to suspect that he may not be who he says he is. It is an intimate study of human relationships and how relationships develop to fulfill a mutual need. When the family finds out the man is merely an imposter they are angry at first and they take him to court but then as they listen to his reasons for pretending they forgive him and at films end we see that the friendship will resume. It is an examination of how relationships form and also an examination of society and how society shapes the way we relate to and see each other. THE WIND WILL CARRY US is another version of this story but instead of the poor man befriending the rich it is about a city dweller befriending village folk. The city dweller finds himself treating the villagers like an object for study because that is his training as a film maker but the villagers just quietly go about their business allowing the city dweller to do his thing. The villagers are a community who all rely on each other and the city dweller is facinated by how the villagers take care of each other. He relies on them for all his practical needs like food and lodging but also for his social needs as well. As he tries to communicate with various villagers we can see that he is trying to make a connection with life that has so far been denied him in the city. The city dweller is the kind of man who quotes poetry freely but for him life is abstract whereas for the villagers life is real. Thus his fascination with them. For the first time in his life he finds himself looking at nature, at life, and at people up close.
Its a very long film with lots of quiet stretches but that is Kiorastami's style--instead of hurrying you along from one scene to the next he allows you to occupy each scene and feel life not in film time but in real time. Once you surrender to the style you begin to feel its magisterial effect. CLOSE UP was kind of grainy and low budget (though still a great film) but this film is state of the art. Truly pristine cinematography. I highly recommend both films.
Movie Review: Unique and Fascinating Cultural Experience
Summary: 5 Stars
I loved "The Wind Will Carry Us" for many reasons. First, there are two story lines, one is what is happening on the physical plane and the other is a representation of two ideas and ways of living.
The main plot is fairly basic. A man goes to a small village (Siah Dareh) built up against a barren mountainside. This alone is fascinating as you observe a culture and how the people live their daily lives. One of the main things that keeps happening throughout the movie is a cell phone ringing.
Each time the phone rings, the engineer from Tehran (Behzad Dourani) has to get into his car and drive up to higher ground. This is interesting because each time he does this something new happens. It almost becomes a little comical, but the funniest part for me was the relationship between the husband and wife in the teashop. I was amused at how similar relationships are in all cultures and how men and women form a deep bond all while withstanding the daily conflicts seeking to drive us apart.
The movie felt very realistic and didn't seem to follow a script. I loved that aspect and also the conversations between the characters had real heart. Instead of "how are you," "I'm fine," they would say things about wishing each other a long life or luck or the most beautiful comment was about "being in your service." The conversations where very interesting and felt very natural, comforting and at times were profoundly beautiful.
There was a strong community aspect where everyone joined together to make life more pleasant. The care and concern of the villagers was profound and moving and made you wish to just go live in this village where people seemed to have made peace with a way of life they truly enjoyed.
I spent most of the time wondering why the engineer was there because I figured an engineer would be building something (although I did seem to understand that a tower was to be built - although the villagers were just digging a hole in the ground), but after reading the reviews, I can see why many think he may have been there to photograph a funeral (he was always carrying around a camera and talking to someone on the phone about a woman who was ill in the village), which makes much more sense. At first I thought he was bringing some sort of technology to the village, but in the end, this is more about how people choose to live.
If you would like to lose yourself in a movie about a faraway village and see how people live their daily lives, this has a lot to offer. I have a love/hate relationship with cell phones, so this movie was especially interesting to me.
~The Rebecca Review
Movie Review: From apes to civilization
Summary: 5 Stars
In 2001-A space odyssey, the thigh bone from a downed animal is used by a primate tool to kill one of the opposition gang and run the rest away. The first use of a tool, the first use of tool as weapon, a joyous cry for start of "civilization".The primate twirls his discovery, the bone, skyward in rejoice. The tumbling bone morphs into a "pan am" space shuttle, and you probably know the rest.
The antagonist in the Wind finds a similar bone at the bottom of a well that a menial worker is digging. The well is for, what we learn, would be the foundation of a new cellular phone tower, or communication.
Our antagonist hero carries the bone around on the dashboard of his jeep, which he uses to rush to the top of the same hill day after day to better reception. He needs to talk to his boss about his journalistic mission of documenting a ritual common in kurdish communities upon a loved one's death. The suggestion is that primitive is something that modern society want to gawk at, at any
cost. We are left to our own devices to guess why this is so, but cheap shows on every television screen across the globe attests to this. From travel "documentaries" to game shows, zero in on primitive instincts.
It is an education of the senses that takes shape in this movie. From innate principals of human values, educated or not, taught by a young student to everyone in the film, to the pleasures of life for life's sake. The taste of cherries if you are lucky to be able to taste them any longer. Although,
here the cherries have also morphed into strawberries being harvested by young and beautiful people who don't gawk at nature as a primitive show, but as the temporary setting of their lives.
At the end, it is clear that to save a life is to save yourself. Our hero goes through the intense trauma of getting help for his unseen well digger friend buried under rubble, and mirrored in the life of a free spirited doctor who has given up a city practice to be carried by the wind to those who can help him save himself.
In The Wind Will Carry Us, the hero twirls his discovery, the bone, onto a clear, fresh, gurgling stream, that is, there is no such a thing as primitive. Life is life, and he manages to capture a couple of instances of it on a couple of frames on his Nikon, after the old woman he was on a death watch of passes away. But his frames show the humanity, not primitiveness of the procession.
Kiarostami captures thousands of distinct instances frames of life being carried away on the frames of this amazing visual poem in traditional of great persian poets.
Movie Review: Another masterpiece from Kiarostami
Summary: 5 Stars
Abbas Kiarostami is surely one of the top talents in cinema anywhere. For those accustomed to Hollywood, Bollywood or European movies, his work will seem deceptively simple and slow. Eschewing professional actors, special effects, top-40 and world music soundtracks, complicated make-up and massive advertising campaigns, Kiarostami makes films that unfold into an extraordinaray philosophical complexity that is firmly and compassionately anchored in day-to-day human experience.
In "The WInd WIll Carry Us," a man from Teheran moves to a small village in order to do a job for his employer. His exact mission is unclear. He has hilarious trouble with his cell phone, flirts with a milkmaid, watches the slow and subtle rhythms of village life, and sometimes does nothing.
It is a testament to Kiarostami's perception and skill that the film-- despite its simple story and slow pacing-- is utterly captivating and complex. The film's title comes from an old Persian love poem that the protagonist quotes during his flirtation:
"In the courtyard, the wind is about to meet the leaves."
The sexual allusion here is also a philosophical one, as the protagonist seems to be waiting for some kind of chemical reaction, something to shake him up and lift him. How this moment of awakening will come is the film's subject, and Kiarostami leads us to it the way life does-- indirectly. We must watch, and look, and SEE, what is happening in the village-- and in the contrast between the protagonist's frantic running after his phone calls and the village's slow and deliberate movement toward the film's climactic ritual emerge its meaning.
Kiarostami's cinematography is simple and effective. He makes superb use of Iran's fall colours-- gold and brown-- and rural dust and emptiness. The simplest scenes-- a man buy cooking oil, women walking-- are fascinating in their wealth of simple detail, and the film's subtle yet powerful climax ends with an unforgettable image of a humerus (thigh bone) drifting in the river.
If life is what happens while we are busy making other plans-- and if art is what happens while we are busy having expectations of film genres-- the Kiarostami's masterwork is living art indeed.
Movie Review: Deep, mysterious, and poetic....another great Kiarostami film...
Summary: 5 Stars
Many people who like Kiarostami talk about Taste of Cherry or Close Up when speaking of his work. This film, however, I think is better than those two excellent films. This was the 2nd film of his I saw, and I think it's a masterpiece. It's very funny, poetic, telling, dramatic, and deeply mysterious. There are many choice moments in the film. The fact that many of the characters are never actually seen, only heard is actually fascinating. The lead character has whole conversations with a man digging a trench, even though we never see him. The lead character's constant problems with his cell phone are good, too. But the scene I really like the most is when the lead character buys milk from a local merchant. The merchant's daughter leads the man down into a cave where they keep their cow, and while talking to the daughter, recites a beautiful poem in which the title of the film comes up. There really is no explanation to why the man reads the poem, but it haunts the film. Kiarostami's style is worth noting too. The poem scene is shot in one long, 5 minute take, and many of the other scenes are shot in a long take style that he used for many of his films. It gives the film a very meditative pace, and it works wonderfully. Most Iranians films are very mysterious and ambiguous at times, telling you only bits of what is actually transpiring. All of the ones I've seen have been wonderful, with special mention going to Abbas Kiarostami and Majid Majidi, the two directors I most admire. They present their country in a way far, far removed from the rather foolish and completely cliched way the mainstream media depicts Iran and all other Arab peoples. The Wind Will Carry Us is my favorite Kiarostami film.