The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)

Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry has been, my favorite overall film at varying times over the past couple of years. I remember feeling like I hadn't seen anything like it. I'll have to put something up about Taste of Cherry at some point, but anyway, after watching that, I got really interested in Kiarostami's stuff, and watched Close-Up and Where Is The Friend's Home? soon after, the latter incidentally being one of the best "Engrish" movie titles in my opinion.

This film displayed the trademarks of his work: mostly improvised, philosophical dialogue, non-actors, long takes, and a plot that's less interested in moving characters from scene to scene, than it is in giving Kiarostami a platform to ask questions.

There are so many things going on in this film, it was hard to determine a common theme. Maybe there isn't one, just thoughts coming and going. An elderly resident of a small village is dying. A TV production crew arrives to cover the grieving rituals of the townsfolk, but...the woman doesn't die. The cynical, fast-paced crew is forced to slow down and experience a part of their world from which they've grown apart. The engineer's endless quest for cell phone reception, driving to the top of a hill over and over again, which is shown in painstakingly real time, showed how far apart these two cultures were, geographically and socially. The world outside of the village seems condescending, looking in at it like an antfarm, waiting for this woman to pass, so they can package it into an exotic little TV story. The men wait and wait...

Here's a scene:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k271xOFeqfs

There's also a scene that takes place in what is essentially a cave, where the engineer buys goat milk from a young girl, that's so haunting and speaks so beautifully to the two alien worlds colliding, the dialogue spoken hesitantly, as if each character is afraid of being who they really are with the other. We can barely see the two of them, the lighting is SO low...oh man, the whole scene is just so eerie and heavy.