Peter Bradshaw 

Willow and Wind review – A unique childhood fable from Iran

Peter Bradshaw: A boy's quest to repair the school window he broke with a football is a trance-like wonder that beautifully conveys the vulnerability of childhood
  
  

Willow and Wind
Willow and Wind: a prose-poem of a film. Photograph: PR

This unclassifiably mysterious picture from Iran, first released in 2000, and scripted by Abbas Kiarostami and directed by Mohammad-Ali Talebi, is part of the roadshow season of films mentioned in Mark Cousins's personal cine-essay A Story of Children and Film. It really is quietly bizarre, yet never behaves as if it is anything other than a realist study of a small child's woes. In fact, it is utterly unreal, like a lucid dream, of such stark plainness that it seems like a quest fable from the middle ages. Talebi's other films, such as Bag of Rice (1998) and The Boot (1993) have similar "quest" motifs, and they are perhaps indicative of the way in which Iranian film-makers found childlike parables to be a way of avoiding state scrutiny and censorship.

A small boy in a remote village is told by his teacher he cannot join the class, because he broke the schoolroom window with his football. He must repair it to be readmitted, so this child (perhaps 9 or 10 years old) somehow borrows the money, approaches the elderly glazier, and winds up carrying a large, unmounted pane of glass himself – with four stiletto-sharp corners and razor edge jammed under his chin – unaided back to the school, across a rainy, windy landscape. Of course it isn't plausible that adults would allow a child to do any of these things! Apart from everything else, it is terrifyingly dangerous. I couldn't watch this without remembering the man getting decapitated by a pane of glass in Damien Omen 2. Yet this filmhas its own trance-like logic and conveys a child's loneliness, vulnerability, fear of abandonment, and fear of being out of one's depth. It is a difficult prose-poem of a film, utterly unique.

Find out if Willow and Wind is on at a cinema near you

 

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