Thanks to an excellent and informative review by Godfrey Cheshire (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/chess-of-the-wind-movie-review-2021) and a subsequent chance to see the film, I now have one more item, apart from Kersti Jan Werdal’s Lake Forest Park, that I’ve seen too late to include on my already–published ten-best list. (And how many more revelations are still to come?) For its luminous cinematography (by Houshang Baharlou) and its remarkable score (by Sheyda Gharachedaghi) alone,Mohammad Reza Aslani’s rediscovered and restored 1976 The Chess Game of the Wind (which I insist on calling it over its meaningless release title,The Chess of the Wind) is a truly impressive movie that really packs a wallop.

And because I lack Godfrey’s knowledge about 20th century Iranian history, I tended to experience it as a sort of Gothic melodrama that seemed closer in some ways to Béla Tarr’s Almanac of Fall than to any other Iranian New Wave feature that I’ve previously seen. And even if I disagree with Cheshire on a couple of minor points (I find the camera movements more evocative of Murnau than of Ophüls, and the wonderful exterior sequences with the washerwomen closer to gossip than to Greek-chorus commentaries), his review provides all the right guideposts into the film’s wonders and dark pleasures. [11/3/21]