Kiarostami's latest majestic puzzlement is pretty inscrutable,
and inscrutably pretty. The Wind Will Carry Us revisits
the dusty metaphysical roads of A Taste of Cherry, but
ventures even further into narrative obscurity by way of repetitions
and repressions recalling Watitng for Godot. Three men
from Teheran, two of whom we never really see, show up in the
remote hillside village of Siah Diareh with an unstated mission.
Without romanticizing the place or its inhabitants, Kiarostami
manages to fully drench us in the village's encompassing duration,
its obligatory climbs and laborious but time-tested survival rhythms.
One of the visitors, Behzad, played wittily by Behzad Dourani,
is the protagonist, whom we see befriending and manipulating a
bright local school boy, Farzad, his main source for information
and assistance. The primary focus of Behzad's attention is a dying
old woman; his curious death watch from a distance suggests that
his mission may to be film a curious local mourning ritual involving
self-scarification. Or he may simply be some sort of Angel of
Death, another vampiric modern feeding on the death of the traditional.
Whenever his relations with his colleagues appear on the verge
of clarification, Behzad is interrupted by a cell-phone call,
and has to scramble to his 4x4 and drive up windy dirt roads to
the higher grounds of a hilltop cemetery to successfully "telecommunicate."
Here he has terse, unhelpful conversations with his apparent boss,
a Mrs. Godarzi (Godard/Godot?), who seems to pressure him to complete
his mission, something he could only accomplish by himself speeding
the elderly invalid's death. The elusive nature of Behzad's mission
and of his identity and nature (he and the boy Farzad have a joking
exchange about whether Behzad is good or evil) and the way this
ties into the title's stoic fatalism and to images such as an
accidentally exhumed human femur floating down a stream, combine
to succeed in keeping the viewer attuned to Kierostami's slowly
unfolding waking dream. You will be very aware of the weight of
the passing minutes while watching The Wind Will Carry Us,
but in succeeding days often refreshed by the tugs of its stubbornly
thoughtful current.