I don’t know if it's my steady diet of reality television, but Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us seems a lot like Big Brother.  The film plays like there are a bunch of hidden video cameras planted around a tiny Iranian village.  As a viewer, I almost felt like I didn’t belong there – like a high tech eavesdropper.  It certainly doesn’t seem like anybody in The Wind is acting, as characters routinely turn their backs to the cameras, uttering nearly inaudible words (thank God for subtitles) that sound so natural, I doubt they were ever written in a script.

The Wind takes place in the Siah Dareh, a pueblo-style town built into the side of a mountain about 450 miles from Tehran.  Siah Dareh is in the middle of nowhere and, according to one of its inhabitants, it was purposely built to remain hidden to the world so it wouldn’t be stolen.  It’s also full of those cute little Gary Coleman-sized doorways.

The film’s main character, who we know only as the Engineer (Behzad Dourani), has brought a small crew of men to the dinky village with a rather secretive mission, but the crew’s assignment isn’t the only thing that Kiarostami keeps hush-hush in The Wind.  We hear the Engineer’s partners talk, but we never see them.  Ditto for a ditch digger that the Engineer meets when he drives to the outskirts of town each time his cell phone rings.  There’s a dying woman in the town that seems to figure into the Engineer’s work, but we never see her, either.  In fact, we never learn for sure what the Engineer is doing in Siah Dareh, but he gives the townsfolk the impression that he’s hunting for buried treasure.

The Engineer befriends a studious young boy, who becomes his guide through the history and customs of Siah Dareh.  The two share a love of poetry (the title of the film comes from a poem), and their dialogue flows so naturally, you’ll swear they’re making it up as they go along.  Every time the Engineer sees the boy, he asks about the dying woman.  The implication is that the Engineer and his crew are supposed to document an ancient funeral custom that takes place in Siah Dareh.  But he could also be the Angel of Death, too.

The main themes of The Wind do seem to concern life and death, but I have a feeling that the whole film may just be Kiarostami’s take on the present political climate in Iran.  There’s just something odd about a guy digging a hole for what he explains will be part of a new telecommunication system for a village that barely has electricity.

The Wind is chock full of some of the most beautifully shot landscapes I’ve ever seen.  If there was a calendar for the film, I’d be first in line to buy one.  Kiarostami’s uncanny ability to omit large chunks of the story and still keep the story interesting and understandable is nothing short of amazing.

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