The Smell of the Wind **

by Hadi Mohagegh

Iranian film, 1h30

Beauty can spring from slowness, The smell of the wind offers the master lesson. In a rural and verdant plain of a peaceful Iran, a man takes care of his son, a mute boy incapable of the slightest movement. With tenderness, he repeats day after day the care in their isolated little house.

Suffering from a malformation of the legs, the father has difficulty moving, which does not prevent him from ensuring their daily life by scraping stones and picking plants that he transforms into medication for the inhabitants of the region. When their transformer breaks down, depriving him and his son of electricity, he goes to a hamlet to call the service in charge of these repairs.

Still shots of beautiful landscapes

With the irruption of a technician, played by the director Hadi Mohaghegh, begins another story, more mobile. He depicts this population, scattered across the plains and the mountains, in moving snippets of life: a man busy mending his wife’s sock, a blind man on his way to a romantic rendezvous, a village guardian of the access to the electrical installation, or even a little boy on the floor doing his school homework.

The imponderables multiply, delaying the repair of the transformer by the state employee, forcing him to make a thousand detours. On the stages of his career and the encounters that punctuate him, Hadi Mohaghegh poses his camera in long static shots. Their length allows you to probe their depth and delicate composition, to let yourself be captivated by the splendor of the landscapes magnified by photography and an acute sense of the frame.

An ode to kindness

The slowness of the narration and the rarity of the dialogues do not make The smell of the wind a film accessible to all. The songs of a woman and birds, the sounds of animals and the wind make up the essence of a soundtrack without affectation. But the quest for a casing turns into a poetic epic.

Reparation takes the turn of a human commitment, all the more poignant as the obstacles pile up. In a refined simplicity, the film secretly deploys a eulogy of mutual aid, an ode to kindness, where everyone, from the healer father to the electrician, from the mender to the blind, embodies the same powerful truth, responsibility towards others. .