Review of Chess of the Wind / شطرنج باد, directed by Mohammad Reza Aslani

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I feel like a lot of my blog introductions, especially when it comes to movies, have been lamenting on the fact I don’t have a ton of time lately. I used to work as a film critic (which, in fact, was so incredibly underpaid that I now make more off of this blog’s display ads than I ever did publishing anywhere else), and then when I was in graduate school I was writing a lot about film, so I used to watch so many movies.

But now I work an 8-5, come home, and then doom scroll my evenings away instead of watching the movies I used to love so dearly. And recently I realized I want to stop doing that, so I’ve set limits on my phone and am fully prepared to sit back and watch more movies and read more books in order to feed my brain.

I ended up acquiring a Criterion subscription in order to try and nourish my brain in this way, and I have actually been watching a ton of movies on the Criterion Channel. I feel like I’m never going to get through the entirety of their catalogue in my life, especially considering I’m pretty broke to pay for this every single year—or at least right now.

I also want to watch more Iranian cinema, and Criterion is the perfect place to get some of the more rare films like Chess of the Wind. I wanted to watch an Aslani film for the longest time, and this seemed like the time.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction.

In an aristocratic Iranian household, a woman becomes paranoid her stepfather will take everything away from her after her mother’s death.

This movie takes place in Iran before the revolution, showing a country on the brink. Its setting is a house of an aristocratic family in Iran, and its matriarch passes away, leaving her wheelchair-bound daughter, Aghdas, as the only person in the house as an heir besides the widower: Hadji Amoo. A chorus of women doing laundry gossip in-between scenes about what’s happening inside of the house and the people living in it.

Hadji has his two nephews, Shaban and Ramezan, living there with him. Ramezan is technically engaged to Aghdas, but he doesn’t actually love her. He just wants her family’s money. There’s also a maid: Kanizak. She takes care of Aghdas and seems to be on her side.

Hadji Amoo and Aghdas both believe themselves to be the rightful heirs of the home, but that’s a point of conflict because they despise each other. Kanizak and Aghdas go to burn the deeds of the house with his name on them, but after that Aghdas realizes the only way out is to kill him. With the help of Kanizak, she’s wheeled in while he’s praying and strikes him with a flail.

They store his body in the cellar, inside of a jar, and decide to come back later and dissolve the body with acid. However, days pass and two creditors come looking for Hadji Amoo. Adghas says she hasn’t seen him, but they declare they’ve seen him on the streets. They go down to the cellar, where the body is nowhere to be found.

From that point on Aghdas is paranoid about what is really happening here. A musical troupe stops by and says they’ve seen him as well, leaving her panicking. She falls ill and retreats to her room, and Kanizak begs Aghdas to let her leave to visit a holy site.

Alone, Aghdas freaks out at night when she hears laughter. She grabs a pistol from her drawer and drags her body down the steps into the basement. There, she sees Kanizak and Hadji Amoo in the bath together. She shoots Hadji Amoo and then has a heart attack, dying on the floor with him.

Turns out Kanizak teamed up with Shaban to try and get the inheritance. But when Kanizak realizes that Shaban does not love her, she starts arguing with him. Ramezan discovers the corpse in the basement, then he comes upstairs to kill Shaban. Kanizak ends up leaving the mansion behind, leaving only a younger boy and Aghdas’ old nanny in the home.

Overall Thoughts

I went into this movie not knowing what to really expect, but one of the standouts, along with this story taking place in Iran right before the revolution, was the cinematography. This is the restored version of the film, as it was banned and lost for decades until it was rediscovered relatively recently.

The restoration is quite beautiful. It also stars some bigger older names in Iranian acting, and it was a delight to see them on the screen for the first time—or in the case of Shohreh, as a young girl.

There’s a lot to unpack with this movie in terms of its sociopolitics and gender themes. I want to rewatch in the near future. All of this is to say, though, that I enjoyed this film a lot! Go see it if you have the chance.

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