The Wind Will Carry Us

The latest Iranian import from director Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry) is, like many Iranian films, beautifully shot and extremely slow-moving. It's also absurdly anticlimactic. A reporter journeys to a remote village that wouldn't look out of place in a Star Wars prequel, hoping to witness an unusual funeral ritual. The trouble is that the old woman who was expecting to die seems to be on the upswing. So the man waits around, passing time mostly by asking the villagers to share their milk with him, helping a local boy cheat on his tests at school, and receiving cell phone calls that require him to drive up to the top of a mountain in order to get decent reception. Then he starts carrying a human leg bone around for no apparent reason. Meanwhile, adolescents in the audience may be amused by images of cows humping, and an extremely long take of a dung beetle rolling a little turd across barren terrain. There's an interesting, but brief, subplot about a cow that stays in a dark underground catacomb and a mysterious milkmaid who won't show her face, but all it finally amounts to is some cool atmospheric shots. And while it would be a spoiler to say whether or not the old woman actually dies by the end of the film, let's just say that the ending seems rather pointless based on what has been set up. If you're the sort of person who just adores painfully sluggish foreign films with a dearth of actual plot, go for it, but the rest of you have been warned.