Stop and Smell the Poetry: Revisiting “The Wind Will Carry Us”
I can no longer remember the first time I saw the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s brilliant film “The Wind Will Carry Us.” It may have been soon after it was released in the United States, almost twenty years ago, and at a time that I was just beginning to study Persian literature and Islamic civilization. I do remember, though, that I was struck right away by the quiet power of the film, and the way that it made me slow down and care about things that I never would have imagined I would care about. Now that I have watched it countless times, I have begun to understand more about its impact, which is undiminished over the years. With the twentieth anniversary of the film’s international release occurring this year, now seems like an apt time to revisit its unique vision, which is essentially a poetic one.
The film moves at a crawl by American movie standards and features only the slenderest of plots. The action, such as it is, hinges on an event that, for most of the film, floats just out of reach – the impending death of an old village woman whose funeral a film crew from Tehran wants to record. Many important characters’ faces remain hidden, while the camera lingers on lowly creatures: a dung beetle rolling its gigantic load, a turtle struggling to right itself after it has been kicked over onto its shell. Yet under the filmmaker’s gaze, these small events excite gigantic curiosity. Where is the beetle going? Will the turtle survive?
The film’s most effective weapons, however, are its words, especially those of poetry. As many film and literary critics have observed, poetry is its warp and weft. Characters casually dip into the vast river of Iran’s poetic tradition and offer sips to friends and strangers; they throw gossamer-thin lines of poetry at each other, using them like a spider uses silk, to tightrope-walk between trees. Poetry creates instant shocks of recognition between the middle-aged and the very young, the city-dweller and the villager. “You know love too,” Behzad, the leader of the Tehrani crew, musingly observes of a friendly well-digger. The digger has recognized his sly references to Farhad, a sculptor who (according to one version of the classical story) carved a canal through a mountain for love of the princess Shirin.
Poetry likewise forms the occasion for one of the film’s most layered, erotic encounters. Behzad, whom we are most used to watching race to the top of a hill to get reception for his cell phone, descends into the cellar of the well-digger’s beloved to obtain milk. To entertain the young woman as she milks a cow in the dark, he recites a yearning, romantic poem by Forough Farrokhzad – the same poem whose final lines give the film its title. As he utters the penultimate verses, the young woman abruptly cuts him off.
On one level the scene gives rise to acute tension in the viewer as it depicts the colliding worlds of a modern, older man and a traditional, young woman. Behzad’s words clearly make the woman uncomfortable. She sits silently after he finishes the poem, resisting his pleas to see her face or tell him her name. Though he is more educated than she, he is unable to see the inappropriateness of his actions and the incongruity of his presence. (In fact, critics have commented on the voyeurism inherent in the scene and Behzad’s treatment of the young woman.)
But the scene can be read differently, too, as a commentary on the fate of a 16-year-old who works alone in a dim, grave-like space. Unlike the other characters, the young woman fails to recognize the poem recited to her; she knows Forough only as the name of a local girl, not as Iran’s most famous poetess. One is reminded of the depressing fate of women that Farrokhzad herself railed against in another poem, “The Mechanical Doll”; the young woman seems to labor in darkness both figuratively and literally.
From this perspective, the poem throws a ray of light into her darkness. Even as its verses embarrass her, they awaken in her aspirations for a world that transcends mud, gloom, and animal husbandry. As the pair leaves the cellar, the young woman breaks her stubborn silence to ask Behzad for how long Forough studied, as though wanting to know how one can become a poet, and if she, with her fifth-grade education, can accomplish it too.
It is via poetry, too, that the film strikes its final thematic chords. As Behzad and a village doctor ride through the hills on the doctor’s moped, the doctor reminds his passenger to celebrate life, for soon we will close our eyes to the beauty of this world. “They say the next world is more beautiful,” responds Behzad. “Who has come back to tell us?” asks the doctor. He quotes lines from Omar Khayyam: “Prefer the present to those fine promises/Even a drum sounds melodious from afar.” The two repeat the verses together as they ride off.
Many Iranians have objected to Kiarostami’s films on the grounds that they draw attention to the country’s primitive and poor rather than its more urbane and well-to-do populations. But there is nothing primitive about “The Wind Will Carry Us.” Its poetic voice is sophisticated and thoughtful; and for those who open their ears to it, the impact is quietly explosive.