MORE WILL BE REVEALED
by Chris Dashiell

While it's easy for me to get in a bad mood, and stay in one, about the quality of movies today, I can genuinely say that any year in which I get to see a bona fide masterpiece is a good one. Not a masterpiece in the looser sense that I sometimes throw around, along with every other critic who runs low on superlatives from time to time, but a real masterpiece of film art - a picture with vision, close to perfect balance between form and content, plus an extra element that seems to come from somewhere higher than the author's intent, a kind of transcendence that feels just right in every way - in my heart, my mind, my gut.

Well, this has been a good year.

THE WIND WILL CARRY US is a film that embraces life in all its contradictions. No single idea can convey its meaning, but if you must have one, I will tell you that it's about living in the present moment. In keeping with its simplicity, the film itself tells us this through the words of one of the characters. In keeping with its subtlety, the main character spends much of the time anticipating the future. The director is Abbas Kiarostami, who has been quietly leading a revolution - the Iranian New Wave, if you will - that has been inspiring filmmakers around the world to approach the cinema with new eyes.

A man and his two assistants visit a remote Kurdish village for a mysterious, unspecified purpose. The man (Behzad Dourani, the only professional actor in the film) is known cryptically as "The Engineer." He latches onto a village boy who becomes his guide through this new environment. It becomes evident, gradually, that he has a particular interest in a sick old woman, the boy's grandmother. It would appear that he and his assistants have come all the way from Tehran to document a certain religious ceremony performed in this village when someone dies. Instead of dying, however, the old woman starts to get better, and that frustrates the Engineer, who is forced to stay there longer than he intended, waiting for this woman to die.

Kiarostami has said that the cinema needs to free itself from the idea of the story. Like any daring statement, this can easily be taken the wrong way. In his case it reflects a stance towards life rather than a definition of technique. The events of The Wind Will Carry Us, as hinted at above, constitute a story of sorts, but they serve more as a thematic puzzle in which the viewer is drawn deeper into different ways of seeing, different perspectives on life. The Engineer carries the ways of the city with him, and the ways of the intelligentsia. He is also a friendly, decent man whose mild and quizzical gaze provides the movie's sole point of view. The contrast between this man's nervous intent and the affable stasis of village life is not biting or satiric. It is gently humorous, humble in the most spiritual sense, above all - human.

The little town, with its white walls and steep winding pathways built into a mountain, is the perfect setting for a film that spots a new wonder around every corner. The look of the picture, the timing, the framing of the images, are all exceedingly beautiful. In one of many parallels to the Engineer's own journey of discovery, the film's story becomes an amusing pretext for portraying various village characters and customs. An ever-present, if less obvious, element of the film's style is its evocation of the unseen. The Engineer speaks to his assistants, but we never see them clearly. They are always offscreen. The same goes for the old woman. A remarkable running joke has the Engineer's cell phone going off, at which he jumps into his car and drives all the way to the top of the hill where he can get good reception. While up there, he meets a man who is digging a trench.This man is also offscreen. We never see him. At one point he tosses our hero a bone.

The title of The Wind Will Carry Us comes from a poem by the feminist writer Forough Farrokhzad. The Engineer, who likes to recite poetry from time to time, has visited the house of a neighbor in order to buy milk. A shy girl milks a cow in a dark cellar while the man from the city recites a poem. A scene that seems strange in the telling has all the naturalness, consequence, and beauty of a special moment in life when seen in the film. The lines of the poem touch on the mystery of life and death, nature, acceptance, loss, and an ultimate serenity - all of which the Engineer celebrates with words but does not yet know in his heart. Everything in the picture has multiple meanings and depths, while at the same time seeming as clear, and as transient, as the reflection in a pool of water.

It has become something of a truism that Kiarostami's films take patience and a reorientation of one's ideas of what a movie should be. The Dreck Factory does condition one to certain forms of perception - passive and sensation-hungry, for instance - that go unnoticed because they are so pervasive. Yet, althought I have always admired the man's work, I haven't been immune myself to a sense of tedium or impatience with the rigorous methods of Taste of Cherry or And Life Goes On, and frankly, I don't think it's entirely cultural. Kiarostami has been working towards a greater integration of vision and method, and I can say unequivocally that he has succeeded beyond my wildest expectations. The Wind Will Carry Us is his best film by far. I was prepared for some doldrums - I'd heard stories of people walking out. Ten minutes into the movie I knew that I was home - I melted into a sense of beauty and serenity and acceptance that emanated from this film. Never restless or bored, I could trust that this picture would take me willingly wherever it wanted. It is a brilliantly nuanced, funny, wise, masterwork of film. Folks, I have seen the present and this is it.

Getting off my pink cloud of elation for a moment, I would like to recommend another film from Iran which is not a masterpiece (isn't one per year enough?) but is nevertheless very good.

A TIME FOR DRUNKEN HORSES was written and directed by Bahman Ghobadi, Iran's first Kurdish director. It's about a group of poverty-stricken Kurdish children who survive by carrying smuggled goods across the Iran-Iraq border. The story centers on a boy named Ayoub who is the breadwinner for his orphaned family of a brother and two sisters. His little brother is handicapped, and Ayoub finds out that he will die in a few weeks unless he gets an operation. He decides to go to any lengths to help his brother, although - and this is the stunning part - even with the operation he will still die in a matter of months.

Ghobadi's style is matter-of-fact, almost like a documentary, with the viewer thrust into situations that only gradually explain themselves, and the desperate circumstances of the characters presented without unneeded emphasis. Nevertheless, the dominant tone is grieving and anxious. The child actors are wonderful. The picture is unflinching in its portrait of these kids' struggle to survive, in a harsh winter setting - the title refers to the practice of feeding alcohol to the horses and mules to keep them from freezing - with the cruel force of circumstance blocking them at every turn. It's a troubling, compassionate, heartbreaking movie - and another reason to be awestruck at the sheer creative energy of Iranian film.

The unspoken bond between mother and daughter lies at the heart of SOLAS, a quietly effective Spanish film, written and directed by Benito Zambrano. A mother in her seventies (Maria Galiana) stays with her daughter Maria (Ana Fernandez) in Seville while her husband, the young woman's father, is recovering from an operation. Maria is an alcoholic, seething with rage and despair, and as the film progresses, we understand why. The father is a tyrant and a batterer, who constantly belittles his wife. While the mother acquiesced, the daughter's trauma has made her life a misery.

Galiana is a marvel. She makes the mother real.This stout old woman, illiterate and fearful of the city, has a quiet resilience and a desire to be of help to other people in little ways. Without excusing her faults, or inflating the story with sentimentality, the picture makes a case for the mother's dogged service and love as a healing force, both for her daughter and a lonely old man who lives in the same apartment complex.

Solas itself has its faults. The events have the overly schematic feeling of middling fiction, where story is used to resolve characters instead of the other way around. The film goes on about a half hour longer than it should, tying up the threads of the story in a neat soap opera way. It is understandable why Zampano was tempted to do this - we usually want to know "what happened" to the characters in stories - but he should have recognized where his emotional high point was, and stopped the film right there. There is also a melodramatic element in Fernandez's performance that goes against the movie's softer grain.

But much can be forgiven. Solas conveys a feeling of love won despite great pain, and it is worth seeing especially for the beautiful and understated acting of Maria Galiana.

CineScene, 2000