The Wind Will Carry Us: Dust to Dust

Growing up, I felt the profound divisions in Iranian society acutely. I was regaled with stories of legendary Persian heroes like Darius and Rostam and Jamshid, of the Persian invention of irrigation and metalwork and astronomy and postal systems and algebra and standardized currency, of our incomparable artists and poets. I was also confronted with the baffling parallel reality of the glowering ayatollah, of grim, bearded men on TV burning flags and beating women and hanging political dissidents. How to reconcile such abject ugliness with the beautiful things I was being told about my people? Historical Persia with contemporary Iran? The horror of the nightly news with the humanity of my family, of my aunt Shahla, who quivers with love for the world and for whom every new experience eclipses the last?

The tension between provinciality and modernity is everywhere apparent in Kiarostami’s work, and it’s a load-bearing theme in The Wind Will Carry Us. The film opens with the documentarian driving into the village, his car breaking down—“it’s given up the ghost,” he says—as if there’s an anti-technology force field around the town. Frustrated by the old woman’s persistent grip on life, he lashes out at those around him. His self-pity consumes him. Endlessly, hilariously desirous of a little milk for his tea, he bothers a man digging a hole in the local cemetery, who tells him, “In the village, knock on any door and they’ll give you milk.” Presented with a solution to his problem, the documentarian still chooses lament: “Even at the sea, there’s no water for me!”

I have watched and rewatched The Wind Will Carry Us over the past month, during which I have been unable to walk farther than the next room without a cane. My always-bad back recently gave out along the fault lines of an old injury. During my convalescence, I have felt an almost cosmic bond developing between the film’s protagonist and me. I feel his anger at being unable to control time. My recovery has required me to move at a maddeningly diminished speed, just as the old woman’s condition imposes a slowness upon the documentarian. Everything takes too long. In this village untouched by time, people repeat themselves constantly. The camera lags behind characters as they walk. The documentarian feels the pressure mounting from his bosses in Tehran, but nothing and nobody moves as he wants them to. Even the tea seems to take its time boiling.

One of the characters who doesn’t bend to the documentarian’s will is a young milkmaid, with whom he at least half-heartedly attempts to flirt by quoting twentieth-century feminist poet Forough Farrokhzad. The milkmaid is utterly uninterested, tugging away at the poor cow’s udders. “Do you know Forough?” he asks her. “Yes, Gohar’s daughter,” she replies, referring not to Farrokhzad but to the child of another villager. The documentarian continues his recitation, closing on the line that gives the movie its title: “Entrust your lips, replete with life’s warmth / To the touch of my loving lips. / The wind will carry us!” “It’s full,” the milkmaid says brusquely. “The bowl is full.” The world and its relentless cycles of labor persist. A bizarre big-city stranger is suddenly making a pass at you in your barn, but the cows must still be milked.

As with reading poetry, so much of watching The Wind Will Carry Us involves imagining lives unfolding beyond the boundaries of the work—lives suggested, alluded to, but never actually shown. The documentarian travels with two assistants we hear but don’t see. The old woman is constantly spoken of but never made visible. The hole-digger, who speaks from offscreen, and the milkmaid, who is enveloped in shadow with her back turned to the camera, are visual voids with the associative quality of poetry, forcing the audience to engage with the world outside the frame. That engagement also places viewers within the moral drama of the film. The documentarian and Kiarostami himself may be commodifying and exoticizing provincial life, but we are the ones consuming and interpreting it—not passively, as it plays across a screen before our eyes, but actively, as we presume to envision the reality of lives that are in fact unknowable to us.

This playful approach to presence and absence can also be found in a reference to one of Kiarostami’s most iconic works. Where Is the Friend’s House? features a recurring image of a mountainside with a worn footpath zigzagging across it. Throughout the film, the eight-year-old protagonist (Babak Ahmadpour) races up and down the hill repeatedly, traveling to and from his home. The image is an unforgettable one, featured on the movie’s original Iranian and English-language posters. The Wind Will Carry Us continually alludes to it by showing uncannily geometric man-made lines cutting across similar knolls and hillsides.

The footpath in Where Is the Friend’s House? is dusty, cut into the face of the hill like a scar. We see it and assume it’s an age-old feature of the landscape, seemingly worn by decades or centuries of plodding rural travel and commerce. In reality, though, Kiarostami dreamed it up. He tasked a group of interns with walking up and down the hill over and over for days to create the footpath for the sole purpose of generating that shot. I think about ecological distress tolerance, and how a hill that had existed unmolested for some unknown interval of planetary time finally ceded its face—gave up the ghost—to the whims of a single man.

In The Wind Will Carry Us, Kiarostami’s self-conscious interrogation of artists’ relationships to their subjects prompts us to ask which among the many objects and details we see on-screen belong to the real-life place and its inhabitants, and which were invented by the crew and actors. Where are we mistaking one for the other, and what does that slipperiness say about us and what we value?

At the same time, the film’s ethical inquiry resists casting the documentarian as a villain. He is manically impatient, but he also takes time to give a busy man a ride. He absentmindedly flips a turtle on its back but also leaps into action when the hole-digger’s tunnel collapses. He defies the imposition of any morally obvious category. He exists as we all do, tottering between the poles of good and bad, capable of (and often enacting) both.

The Wind Will Carry Us has its own doubleness. When we watch a Kiarostami film, the movie he has made coexists with the one we create by watching, a psychospiritual drama about art and ethics and the persistence or corrosion of the soul. There is a slowness to the director’s approach, a faith that creeps into places where the jackhammer of more explicitly didactic art cannot reach.

“Do you think I’m bad?” his character asks. We stare, we breathe, we stare.

“How can you be sure?”