Hidden Flick: The Wind Will Carry Us

Indeed, the film succeeds on both the simplest and most complex levels—the lead character, played by Behzad Dorani, drives to a beautiful cemetery atop a mountain to get cell phone service, shaves and prepares for the day’s events (which never come), seeks milk which is slow in coming for some reason (although each little domicile appears to have it in certain quantities), and befriends the locals, including a charming young lad, who humors the filmmaker, and a woman who has given birth to ten children—five boys and five girls—and continues to work as if all of life is a continuous circle, and she is in tune with its rhythmic turn of the wheel. Meanwhile, he remains idle, and, as he finds out later on, “idleness leads to corruption.”

But Dorani’s character, the urbane, intelligent, cynical, yet morally ambiguous city chap, isn’t in tune with much of anything. In fact, he is chained to his assignment, and the octogenarian doesn’t seem to want to cooperate with the filmmaker’s task at hand. If she dies, he can document the ceremony, and get the hell out of this heavenly place. If she doesn’t pass on, then, well, he isn’t quite sure. In the meantime, the poetry of the village surrounds his existence, and it plants the seeds of a beautiful metaphysical tale within his thick mind and that of the viewer of the film, too.

One is left with the impression that man’s achievements will be a fleeting monument to nothing, and here, here in this mountain village community which at first seems so routinely bucolic and poverty-stricken, the soul of humanity truly breathes. The depth of the imagery and the story written by Kiarostami, is deceptively profound, but always poignant. Actually, the title, from a poem written by the late Iranian poet, Forough Farrokhzad, is an apt metaphor for the film’s subtext—the wind will carry us, near and far away—and even serves as a character at times, as the rich sounds of nature, specifically the wind as it ebbs and flows in the fore- and background of the sound design, are a sublime addition to a fine piece of cinema, an engaging slice of celluloid which subtly celebrates the hidden truths of daily life, shadowing an almost silent, unheard music captured by the wind and carried off to another breathtaking locale.

And within the Unheard Music, the silent sounds of the daily ritual that you and I share, we toil amongst ourselves, neither forgetting or acknowledging each other’s existence, until we are free…a moment and then nothing, night shudders beyond this window and the earth winds to a halt. Beyond this window something unknown is watching you and me. There’s laughing inside, but we’re locked outside the public eye. X marks the spot.

Randy Ray

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