Prefer the Present:
Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us

November 2, 2007

The short film summary on the Netflix envelope mentioned that The Wind Will Carry Us is the most "socially critical work" by Abbas Kiarostami. It did turn out to be socially critical, but not in the way one might expect. Watching an Iranian film, I thought a socially critical work would turn its attention to clerics or the place of women in Islam. but if this film is critical about anyone it is the secular and somewhat mysterious engineer who is at the center of the film. City life in general seems to be made to stand judgment in the person of the engineer.

The engineer has come to a small hillside village 450 miles from Tehran. We are never quite sure why. He is waiting for an old woman to die. Meanwhile we see him endlessly maneuvering the entrances and open corridors of this traditional village. Kiarostami is fond of repetitive settings.. perhaps showing us that life is most interesting in the places where we always are.

One element of comedy that runs throughout the film is the constant interruption caused by cell phone calls. Inevitably the engineer ends up racing for higher ground in his jeep. This zone of cell phone reception turns out to be a graveyard.. and there is a man digging a trench. Why is he digging a trench? The man answers that it is for "telecommunications".

In this village the concept of telecommunications is absurd. The engineer rushes to receive his long distance calls from Tehran but they are inevitably inconclusive.. not real acts of communication: so- and-so will eventually talk to so-and-so. Bu it is not that the village is simple.. and thus not in need of cell phones. As we watch, Kiarostami gives a sense of the richness of communication: people looking on from roofs, neighbors talking, people sitting in a cafe, or news exchanged casually at a door. The village stands out as the greatest technological advance ever.. while the modern world struggles to get a signal.

Near the end the man who is digging a telecommunications ditch has the dirt fall in on him. Luckily our engineer is there and he goes to warn the neighboring men of the danger. They all show up and work to save the worker.

The comradery.. or at least sense of community.. is evident in the scene. Miraculously it appears the man will survive. They pile into the engineer's truck and head to the hospital.

This sets up a long shared motorcycle ride. The engineer rides with a poor doctor, his motorcycle marked with a red crescent. At the end of their time together they discuss the old woman whose death the engineer is awaiting:

engineer: old age is a terrible illness.
doctor: yes, but there are worse illnesses.. death.

engineer: death?

doctor: yes, death is the worst. When you close your eyes on this world, this beauty, the wonders of nature, and the generosity of God, it means you'll never be coming back.

engineer: They say that the other world is more beautiful.

doctor: But who has come back from there to tell us if its beautiful or not? "They tell me she is as beautiful as a houri from heaven! Yet I say that the juice of the vine is better. Prefer the present to those fine promises. Even a drum sounds melodious from afar." Prefer the present.

Those final lines are from classical Persian poetry.. Omar Khayyam, the great poet of disillusion. These sections of the work of Kiarostami often seem to carry the meaning of the film; a similar scene comes near the end of Taste of Cherry. You can hardly call it a moral.. it is too ethereal for that. It is a sense of life that seems aimed at the petty modern world of the engineer, who with his camera could easily be a stand-in for the director himself.

Shortly after this scene the engineer picks up and leave, even though the death of the old woman has finally come. Whatever he has been waiting for is now here. But oddly he hastens to leave. He snaps a few photos.. where perhaps he wanted to document the whole ceremony.. and takes off.

The village should be left alone, evidently. It is a city that we learn was built and named by the "ancients". The modern world could only make such a place go backwards. This is a strikingly romantic view of the village.. although it conveys that view without the usual Hollywood trappings.