There should be a club for slow movie lovers, as there is for slow food lovers; those of us who are too old for our visual comprehension to be shaped by MTV style editing. This is one of those movies. It's a meditation on history - this historical difference between the protagonist (the engineer), who lives in a world defined by contemporary speed, but isn't, because he has to get into his car and travel several miles up-hill every time he gets a cell phone call (very funny I thought) and the ageless, timeless lifestyles of the villagers he's studying. My read is that he's doing an ethnological project, trying to record a ancient ceremony of mourning that involves self-mutilation of mourners to prove their allegiance to the deceased, thus protecting their livelihoods, as a symbol of the power politics of a small in-bred community. As Westerners, for whom most of the world that doesn't include McDonalds and KFC is a great smeary blank, the visuals of the landscape, the golden houses, the rabbit-warren quality of the village, the constant presence of pastoralists, are a revelation, in their beauty, and the ancient forms of human life on earth that they evoke. These are the movies I love; the mystery of their meaning and their reminder of what life was like for thousands of years before MTV/ iPods and the Internet is a crucial part of why.
Review of The Wind Will Carry Us
