Master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s films were many things, but “plotty” wasn’t one of them. His 1999 gem The Wind Will Carry Us, released in a ravishing new 4K restoration from the Criterion Collection ($31.96 Blu-ray), is a perfect example of his experiential approach to moviemaking, one that’s liberated from the structural shackles of narrative. Instead, it’s a movie as hangout, a rare opportunity to jettison our conventional ideas of the fiction-film form and appreciate time, space, conversation and the illusion of happenstance. For this chronicler of the miraculous everyday, it is only when nothing happens that everything happens.
And so we can dispense with plot in a line or two. A stealth documentarian (Behzad Dorani) from Tehran arrives in a remote Iranian village with his crew in order to capture the imminent demise of a centenarian elder and the subsequent, self-brutalizing mourning rituals of her fellow villagers. But when his subject stubbornly refuses to expire, Dorani’s stranger in a strange land is forced to extend his stay in the fecund countryside, communing with the locals and adapting to their slower pace and quieter customs.
These include daily conversations with a child who serves as Dorani’s tour guide and is something of a town crier; and periodic conversations with an unseen well digger the documentarian “meets” while perched atop an ancient cemetery — the only place in the village with cell reception, and where he fields calls from his increasingly frustrated employer. Within this site-specific tapestry of encounters, Kiarostami meditates on universal dialectics — family and work, and which labors constitute work; life and death, and the mysteries of the afterlife; city and country; what is revealed and what is obscured — all expressed through the director’s typically unhurried pace.
Perhaps foremost among the film’s subtle examinations is that of identity. Dorani’s character, who is never given a name, is referred to by the townsfolk as an engineer, a plausible profession given his heterodox white-collar wardrobe. He also masquerades as a treasure hunter, the cover story he offers to his child-guide for his crew’s presence in their village. Mostly, he carries himself like an ethnographer or an anthropologist, curiously inquiring on the lives of everyone he meets — their work, their children, their relationships.
He is, in short, an avatar for Kiarostami himself, who spent six months in the village before filming, and who cast The Wind Will Carry Us with many of its locals. His most celebrated films, including Close-Up and Taste of Cherry, explored similar meta dimensions, reflecting on his ethical role as an artist and exposing the medium’s artifices by hybridizing documentary and fiction. Dorani resembles Kiarostami both physically and in his mannerisms, and when he seems to struggle with the tenuous barrier between documentation and exploitation of the village’s rituals, we can interpret them as the director’s own conflicts manifested onscreen.
The Wind Will Carry Us opens and closes on movements. We’re introduced to Dorani through an extended aerial shot of his station wagon navigating serpentine desert roads en route to the village, his directions opaque. It ends with Dorani, having nominally completed his task, returning a leg bone gifted to him by the well digger back to the land from whence it came, specifically to a river, its destination unknown. It’s the most consequential-seeming toss of a bone since the Dawn of Man sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and in keeping with Kiarostami’s ambiguous métier, we’re left to similarly unpack its meaning.
Without revealing everything — no magician would — Kiarostami does help to point the way by examining his themes and methods in an indispensable interview recorded in 2002, and included as one of several Blu-ray supplements. In it, he addresses the movie’s wending bookends, as well as another signature scene in which he observes an apple rolling down a slope and through a chute — which took Kiarostami and his crew a day’s work to engineer just right — as interventions that either inspire or inhibit flow.
He also speaks on topics such as the presence of wildlife in his movie; the thrill of the blank page in literature and, so to speak, in cinema; the creative distinctions between a particular tracking shot and its subsequent panning shot; and his challenge of recapturing, through Dorani’s character, his own first impressions in the village that provided the movie’s natural location. Most poignantly, given Kiarostami’s abrupt passing in 2016, is his astute perception of mortality, a central theme in The Wind Will Carry Us: “We don’t understand death. It only happens to other people.” And still, the river flows on.