Rick’s Reel Recommendations | 3 Films on Wind

FILM COLUMN | ISSUE SEVEM | MATARIKI

Written by Ricky Lai (he/him) | @rickthelai on IG & Letterboxd | Columnist

The pūrākau about the formation of Matariki tells us that its stars were formed by an act of grief and anger by Tāwhirimātea, the god of wind and weather. To match, I’ve dusted off three essential films on the subject of wind.

1. The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928)

Checks out. If there was ever a more comprehensive depiction of wind in film, it’d have to be called Wind 2. Now that we bask in the pleasures of immersive sound design, computer-generated imagery, and crisp, high-definition remasters, it may be a tall ask for me to divert your attention to the silent past, especially when watching The Wind requires you to lay your eyes on a chalky-looking transfer on YouTube. My best rebuttal is that films are primarily about pictures, and said pictures hold power, no matter how chintsy the quality, and the facial expressions of Lillian Gish were blessed to endure a hundred years. Gish lends these emotions to the rollicking anxiety of Letty, a woman who travels by train to her cousin’s ranch in Sweetwater, Texas, and is knocked to and fro by strong gusts in the Southern plains. Upon arrival, she touches a nerve with her cousin’s envious wife and, after being booted from the ranch, subsequently struggles to find a sturdy domicile to take shelter in and settles as the housewife to an abusive cattle buyer. On top of this, the wind isn’t helping. In this terrifying masterwork, the wind scratches at the window like a demon. It knocks riders off horseback and throws dust all over the kitchen. It buries you in your own dirt and threatens to snatch away whatever you have. The ending disappoints, admittedly – Letty is a woman at odds with all strains of domestication, toiling against a literal storm to free herself, and the darker ending that Gish and Sjöström intended was, ironically, swept away from their grasp by the studio’s rewrites of their script. You can and should scrutinise the patriarchal implications of this story’s ending until the mares come home. But watch the wind, read Gish’s faces, sift between those lines, and tell me there isn’t a different story being told.

1. Samba Traoré (Idrissa Ouédraogo, 1992)

I love stories about travellers who come into a town which spits them back out again. People trying to adapt to a way of life (in this case, re-adapt) and failing; passing through like wind between swishing reeds. The Burkinabe thriller Samba Traoré takes its namesake from its protagonist, who narrowly slips arrest (and death) after robbing a petrol station, then returns to his native village in the hopes of integrating back into an affectionate life with his lover and friends. Old habits die hard, however, and Samba Traoré brings with him little signs of rehabilitation from his reckless past, not to mention hearsay among the villagers that his suitcase of money was not, in fact, earned via labour in the city. Ouédraogo’s adapts the Italian neo-realism movement for the African savannahs, favouring naturalistic performances with his cast of non-actors (think Bicycle Thieves), and hushing occasionally to observe nature outside of the story’s framework. The natural world is captured with such leisure that it is of such immediate, tragic contrast to the man who is fleeing the police and wears those gunshots in his nightmares. Samba, despite his volatility, gets a redemptive chance at trying on a new life for size, but barely any time to get comfortable. As much as I will remember the sequence where villagers co-operate in quick time to help a lady give birth, I’ll also remember Samba’s first night back in town, already bothering a local by asking if her husband can come out for a drink. ‘Not for too long’, she says. By the end of the scene, it is morning again, and the two drunkenly part ways. Samba experiences a slice of the kind of life he could live, the type of man he could become.

1. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (Wolfgang Reitherman & John Lousbery, 1977)

If you ever need to recalibrate or catch a breath amidst this crazy weather, pay a visit to the Hundred Acre Wood. Maybe you’ve never actually stopped by before, and don’t know exactly if Rabbit will ever have a peaceful afternoon to himself, nor who resides in the house of ‘Trespassers William’, and never what compels Tigger to bounce far too high for his own good. Like with any group of friends, there are a hundred unanswerable questions, plenty of which aren’t worth answering anyways, and you’d be better off just stopping by to see it all instead.