Bad ma ra khahad bord (1999)

Director:

Abbas Kiarostami

Writer:

Abbas Kiarostami (writer)

Release Date:

1 October 1999 (Italy)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

Irreverent city engineer Behzad comes to a rural village in Iran to keep vigil for a dying relative. In the meanwhile the film follows his efforts to fit in with the local community and how he changes his own attitudes as a result. |

Plot Keywords:

Village | Iran | Tradition | Milk | Cell Phone

Awards:

3 wins & 4 nominations

Cast

Behzad Dorani	...	Engineer
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Noghre Asadi
Roushan Karam Elmi
Bahman Ghobadi
Shahpour Ghobadi
Reihan Heidari
Masood Mansouri
Ali Reza Naderi
Frangis Rahsepar
Masoameh Salimi
Farzad Sohrabi
Lida Soltani

Also Known As:

The Wind Will Carry Us (Canada: English title) (USA)
Le vent nous emportera (France)

Runtime:

118 min

Country:

Iran | France

Language:

Persian

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Australia:G (TV rating) | Australia:PG (DVD rating) | South Korea:All | Singapore:PG | Argentina:Atp | Hong Kong:I | Sweden:Btl | Switzerland:7 (canton of Geneva) | Switzerland:7 (canton of Vaud) | UK:U

Filming Locations:

Siah Dareh, Iran

Company:

MK2 Productions

Trivia:

The title is a reference to a poem written by Iranian famous modern female poet Forough Farrokhzad.

Quotes:

Engineer: Hurry up get in.
Farzad: I can't come now.
Engineer: Why?
Farzad: I need one more answer for the exam.
Engineer: What is it?
Farzad: The fourth question.
Engineer: You don't know the answer?
Farzad: No.
Engineer: Why?
Farzad: Because I don't.
[...]

Movie Connections:

Featured in Chaplin Today: The Kid (2003) (TV)

A Man In and Out of Time

A man out of time finds the way back in. And so, too, do we. Films about such big subjects, metaphysical, quasi-metaphysical, or near metaphysical, can't afford to be petty. So this one meanders, lays a loose and light hand on its subject, finds and follows it by a process of mutual discovery, audience and film maker wandering an unknown road, led by faith in a final destination.

Three men journey from Tehran to a tiny remote village for purposes unknown. Contrasts evolve between their urban modernity and the ageless life of the rural village. They're ostensibly there for the funeral of an ancient woman, a stranger, not a relative, who confounds their expectations by not dying. Let's just say, for the sake preserving the mystery, that they're there, in a way, to cheat death, to rob the villagers of a ritual they themselves fail to understand.

By way of first person narration, the film centers on their leader (Behzad Dourani), a man who accepts being called "engineer," but really isn't--or is he? The perspective is doubled: The world of the film narrowly revolves around him at the same time that it doesn't, claustrophobically relating everything to his solitary universe, at the same time that it encompasses the full scope of a world independent of him, thus giving the lie to his limitations, his distortions and blindness. This is narrative executed with great skill, care, and a free imagination.

Forced to wait, idle and deprived of most of his customary modern distractions, his anxiety, emptiness, and his unease surface; this is a man out of time, who resists the present and fights against the future. His one connection to the outside world, a cell phone, requires every time it goes off that he drop whatever he's doing to run to his truck and drive up to a mountain-top cemetery for clear reception, an association of technology with death concurrent with its indifference to and alienation from it, a comical escapade repeated periodically throughout to give the film a rhythm, an intrusive repetitious beat that contrasts with the natural rhythms of the village.

With nothing else to do, he gradually is tugged by and eventually succumbs to the life around him. This is the kind of movie in which a shot is held so a rooster can walk across the frame. We, too, are made to wait. While waiting, stuck in a plotless limbo, all sorts of beautiful and instructive things emerge from an apparently banal reality, if one cares to notice. There is the unassuming visual poetry of the world, the shadows on a wall of a woman hanging clothes, rolling hills of golden grass, and the organic architecture of a village molded into a hillside; and the subtlety of social interactions: the tender trust of a young boy; the engineer's yearning for a pot of milk, which finally leads him into a primeval cave-like cellar alone with a fecund young woman who refuses his money; the casualness of the birth of a neighbor woman's 10th child; the shrewish complaints of a cafe proprietor, which are answered by one her customers with implacable peasant wisdom; and so on, one scene following upon another, small miracles falling into our laps unannounced.

If only this process of poetic inference, metaphor, indirection, and openness were in more widespread use, commonly adapted, thus more fully developed, instead of the literal dry analytic "objectivity" which tyrannizes modern fictions, nails meaning as if to a cross. Here there isn't even a hint of manipulation or exploitation, not a drop of didacticism. Instead, Kiarostami achieves the difficult feat of keeping water in cupped hands. The film teaches us to observe nature by observing nature.