Movie Review: Everybody Knows

Everybody Knows *** / *****

Directed by: Asghar Farhadi.

Written by: Asghar Farhadi.

Starring: Penélope Cruz (Laura), Javier Bardem (Paco), Ricardo Darín (Alejandro), Eduard Fernández (Fernando), Bárbara Lennie (Bea), Inma Cuesta (Ana), Elvira Mínguez (Mariana), Ramón Barea (Antonio), Carla Campra (Irene), Sara Sálamo (Rocío), Roger Casamajor (Joan), José Ángel Egido (Jorge), Sergio Castellanos (Felipe), Iván Chavero (Diego), Tomás del Estal (Andres), Imma Sancho (Clara), Paco Pastor Gómez (Gabriel).

 

Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi works better in his native country than when he ventures outside of it. In films like About Elly, A Separation or The Salesman, Farhadi is able to combine the personal and the political of his home country in intricate, subtle ways. When he steps outside of Iran – like in The Past - set in France – which I really didn’t like at all, or his latest, Everybody Knows – set in Spain – I think some of the specificity of what he does best is lost. Everybody Knows has a few other problems as well – it is, in some ways, very similar to Farhadi’s About Elly, in that it centers on a character’s disappearance, but this time the fascinating mystery at About Elly’s core in missing. Also, Farhadi teases a lot of interesting, bold solutions to the mystery – but ends up going with none of them, and instead basically comes up with a solution out of left field. And yet, there are parts of Everybody Knows that are so strong – the cinematography, the two central performances for example – that even if Everybody Knows is undeniably minor Farhadi – it’s still well worth seeing.

 

The film is set in Spain, and revolves around Laura (Penelope Cruz) returning to her hometown from Argentina to attend the wedding of her sister. She has brought along her two kids – including teenager Irene (Carla Campra) – but her successful husband Alejandro had to stay behind for work. Farhadi lets the opening scenes – through the wedding – play out at length (well more than 30 minutes), as we get to know the different characters – including Paco (Javier Bardem), who was Laura’s longtime love before she left Spain, and his new wife Bea (Barbara Lennie). Paco was the son of servant’s who worked for Laura’s family – but over the years, the tables have turned a little bit. Laura’s family has fallen on some hard times, while Paco now runs a winery on his estate outside of town. There is an unspoken tension there – sexual between Laura and Paco, and some built up resentment between her family and him, but for the wedding, everyone just pretends to get along. All that changes however when at the wedding, Irene gets drunk – and goes to lie down. When Laura goes to check on her, she is missing. Soon text messages from the kidnappers start arriving – and family secrets and tensions start to come out.

 

I won’t really say much more about the plot of Everybody Knows – although, I do think it’s clear that Farhadi isn’t as interested in the narrative as what it does to the various characters. Given that though, it is a little odd that he throws in so many misdirection’s throughout the film about who may be responsible. By doling out a little information at a time – and keeping Alejandro (Ricardo Darin) off-screen so long, he becomes a prime suspect. But then everyone becomes a suspect at some point. But like with About Elly, he doesn’t seem very interested in actually solving the mystery – but rather the mess the mystery leaves behind. The difference here is that the danger Elly was in in that film was at least partly theoretical – no one knew what happened to her – and the people she left behind barely knew her. It changes the calculations in many ways when the danger is very real, and the people left behind are her family. There’s a few moments when Farhadi seems to want to push the film is some harsh ways – like when Bea starts to confront Laura’s family at one point – but eventually pulls back.

 

The best parts of the movie are probably the lead performances by Cruz and Bardem. Of course, the real life couple has undeniable chemistry, and it’s an interesting thing to have them be ex’s here – but ex’s who still have a bond with each other. Cruz becomes more and more of a wreck throughout the course of the movie – looking very much like the worried mother who hasn’t slept or stopped crying for days on end. Bardem has to be vulnerable here in surprising ways – his world is turned upside down, but he feels he cannot talk about it with anyone. As in the best Farhadi movies, everything here exists in shades of grey – without good guys or bad guys, but with characters we like doing undeniably cruel things (often in the past) that haunts them. Their secrets are what ultimately come to the surface and threaten to destroy things. In Everybody Knows those secrets do come spilling out – and Farhadi refuses to wrap them up in a neat package. By the end of the movie, it’s not clear where anyone goes from here. It’s also clear that while some family secrets are not so secret anymore, new ones have been created.

 

I think Everybody Knows is mainly a good melodrama from Farhadi – it is satisfying, and well-acted, and looks absolutely gorgeous. And yet, what’s missing from it is what makes the best Farhadi films great – a larger sense of the community and culture the story takes place in. Here, it takes place in Spain, but the film lacks that cultural specificity that often makes his films great. It seems like he wanted to work with Bardem and Cruz – a worthy desire – and tried to tell a more broadly universal story. It works – but his best films work because that they are not broadly universal - they are specific to their time and place.

Movie Review: The Salesman

The Salesman

Directed by: Asghar Farhadi.   

Written by: Asghar Farhadi.

Starring: Taraneh Alidoosti (Rana Etesami), Shahab Hosseini (Emad Etesami), Babak Karimi (Babak), Mina Sadati (Sanam), Farid Sajjadi Hosseini (Naser), Mojtaba Pirzadeh (Majid), Emad Emami (Ali), Maral Bani Adam (Kati), Mehdi Koushki (Siavash), Sam Valipour (Sadra). 

 

 Iranian director Asghar Farhadi makes tricky movies in which our sympathies shift throughout, often in very unexpected ways, as situations that at first seem so simple, become massively complex. His masterpiece is the Oscar winning A Separation (2011), in which one decision has many consequences for all involved. His latest film, The Salesman, does something similar – although I think Farhadi is also trying to do something more this time around (I know many people loved the film he made in between A Separation and The Salesman – the French co-production, The Past, but I thought it wasn’t a particularly good retread of what he had already done). This film isn’t just a moral question, where our sympathies shift as we learn more information – but it is also about the different roles we all play in our lives – most of those roles self-imposed. I don’t think Farhadi is quite able to bring everything together in the way he attempts – but he comes close, and you have to admire the attempt.

 

The film focuses on the a married couple – Emad (Shahab Hosseini – who won the Best Actor Prize at Cannes for this role) and Rana (Tarraneh Alidoosti – who was excellent as the missing title character of Farhadi’s 2009 film About Elly). They are actors – about to embark on a local production of Death as a Salesman – playing Willy and Linda Loman when an earthquake rattles their apartment building, and forces them to move out on short notice. A friend in the theater company Babak (Babak Karimi) – is a building manager, and has just had an apartment open up – and the couple move in. Then one night, while she is alone Rana buzzes in a visitor – who she thinks is Emad - and heads to the bathroom – where she ends up being attacked. She is left bloody, but generally okay. The rest of the movie involves Emad trying to track down the man who committed the crime – Rana doesn’t want to go the police, but Emad does have the man’s truck and keys and cell phone – which he left behind in his hurry to escape. He also starts to learn a little about the former tenant – who the neighbors refer to as “promiscuous” – but it’s easy to tell they mean she was a prostitute.

 

The Salesman is an interesting movie from beginning to end – and it certainly does ask some tough questions. Emad is at the heart of nearly every scene – we see him trying to investigate the crime, as well as at his teaching job, on stage playing Loman, and trying to deal with his traumatized wife. His desire to find his wife’s attacker is genuine – but you also get the impression that he’s doing it in part because he feels that he is “supposed to” – that he feels that he should be the one to avenge his wife. This becomes even more pronounced in the film’s final act – when he finally gets to confront the attacker, in an intense sequence of events, where Farhadi excels, once again, at making our sympathies shift. Emad does seem overly concerned with what the neighbors think- and appearing strong from them. He is playing a role in these scenes as much as he is when he is onstage – on in front of his classroom, or even when he’s trying to comfort his wife – and it eventually exhausts him.

 

I wish some of the complexity had extended to some of the other characters – in particular Rana. I think Alidoosti’s portrait of a woman dealing with PTSD after her attack is excellent, yet in the third act, her actions don’t entirely seem genuine. I also wish that the film had done a better job of tying together Death of a Salesman to the action of the rest of the movie – it doesn’t have to be in an obvious sort of way (like in George Cukor’s A Double Life from 1947, where an actor – Ronald Colman in an Oscar winning role – playing Othello becomes a jealous monster), but it almost seems like the point Farhadi is making here could be made with any play (I have heard some compare the attacker to Willy Loman – which, I guess, I could see – but it’s a stretch). Also I do think Farhadi needed to do a better job with some of the gender dynamics in the film – which are fairly retrograde - the prostitute, who we never even see, is basically blamed for everything, by everyone in the film, with no hint of any critique of it, as well as the fact that Emad is playing out a very old fashioned view of masculinity, in which the wife being attacked is almost viewed as an attack on the husband more than on his wife.

 

Still, while these are issues I had with the movie – and they keep it from being as great as A Separation (or About Elly), doesn’t completely derail the film either. Farhadi remains one of the most interesting writer/directors around, making morally complex film that challenge the audience to see things in multiple ways. The Salesman isn’t his best work – but even lesser Farhadi is well worth seeing.

Movie ReviewL About Elly

About Elly
Directed by: Asghar Farhadi   
Written by: Asghar Farhadi & Azad Jafarian.
Starring: Golshifteh Farahani (Sepideh), Shahab Hosseini (Ahmad), Taraneh Alidoosti (Elly), Merila Zare'i (Shohreh), Mani Haghighi (Amir), Peyman Moaadi (Peyman), Ra'na Azadivar (Naazi), Ahmad Mehranfar (Manoochehr), Saber Abar (Alireza).

The characters in the films of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi are always only superficially happy – they are hiding a lot of secrets, that will over the course of the movie come out, and ruin everything. This was true of his Oscar winning A Separation and the follow-up, The Past (which everyone seemed to like more than I did – but I loved A Separation). This year saw the first release stateside of About Elly – his debut film, made before A Separation or The Past, and its fascinating to see where he started from – and it is a confident debut, that is undeniably the work of the same writer/director.

The film is about several families heading off for a beach vacation in a large, sprawling, dilapidated house down by the water. Everyone is part of a couple already – except for Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini) and Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti). Ahmad has recently gotten divorced from his German wife, and Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahami) thinks that Elly would be a good match for him. But Sepideh doesn’t know Elly very well at all – and no one else on the trip knows her at all. Everyone is seemingly having a good time on their first night – and Ahmad and Elly do seem to be getting along. But Elly says she has to return to the city – she has a sick mother. And then two of the children go into the water when they shouldn’t have – they end up okay, but no one can find Elly. Did she go into the water to try and save them, and drown? Did she leave without telling anyone? As the long day turns into a longer night and then back again, the couples talk and talk, and find out just how little they know about Elly –and each other, and frayed relationships start coming apart.

This is a film that sneaks up on you slowly. In its first act, it’s a fun, and kind of breezy. These characters could be middle class Americans on vacation – they seem secular, fun loving and easy going. When Elly goes missing however, that is when things start to become tense – and when the reality of living in Iran starts becoming apparently. Even if none of these characters are overly religious – they do know they could be consequences for inviting a single woman along with them on vacation – especially when they get word from her supposed brother, who is really her fiancé. But then, why was she there if she was engaged? Did she want to get married to this man? And what’s his reaction?

There are elements of the thriller genre here that isn’t readily apparent in Farhadi’s other films – which are more straight ahead dramas. Farhadi doesn’t use the genre hook as a crutch however – but really, masterfully uses it to evoke tension, which helps to fracture things even more. Sepideh in particular goes from being the most outgoing and fun loving of the bunch, to someone who is pretty much destroyed by what happened – growing older seemingly by the minute in the film’s second half, as one by one, everyone turns against her.

The film really is quite something – especially for a first time filmmaker. It’s funny, touching, thrilling and tragic –and it moves through this various stages of the movie with ease. We already know what Farhadi is capable of – A Separation is even better than About Elly – but this is a fascinating first chapter in what has become one of the more interesting voices to come out of International Cinema in the last few years.  

Movie Review: The Past

The Past
Directed by: Asghar Farhadi.
Written by: Asghar Farhadi.
Starring: Bérénice Bejo (Marie Brisson), Tahar Rahim (Samir), Ali Mosaffa (Ahmad), Pauline Burlet (Lucie), Elyes Aguis (Fouad), Jeanne Jestin (Léa), Sabrina Ouazani (Naïma), Babak Karimi (Shahryar), Valeria Cavalli (Valeria).

I remember in the wake of  the success Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation (2011), which won the Foreign Language Film Oscar, there was talk of an American remake – which struck me as a particularly bad idea. A Separation was so rooted in Iranian culture and tradition, that while you could transplant to America if you wish, you would likely lose most of what was special about it in the first place. Farhadi’s new film, The Past, isn’t an American one, and isn’t a remake of A Separation, but I think it still proves my point. The Past is set in France, and while there are Iranian characters in it, it is still very much a French film. In many ways, it seems like Farhadi is trying to repeat the success of A Separation in a different location – once again there is a separating couple at its core, a dysfunctional family, and horrific secrets, and once again, we don’t get all the pieces to put together the puzzle until the end of the movie. Yet while A Separation was a devastating movie, The Past left me oddly cold – the whole movie feels manufactured and phony – like a Hollywood remake of your favorite foreign film.

 The film stars Berenice Bejo (best known for her work in The Artist) as Marie. She has already been married twice and has two daughters by her first marriage. The movie opens with her second husband, Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) coming back to Paris from Iran after four years away in order to finalize their divorce. This is very important to Marie, because she has fallen in love with Samir (Tahar Rahim), and wants to marry him – which could be a problem since he is already married, although his wife is in a coma due to a suicide attempt. Nevertheless, she is living with Samir, his young son Fouad (Elyes Aguis), and her two daughters – moody teenager Lucie (Pauline Burlet) and innocent little Lea (Jeanne Jestin).

A Separation hinged upon a miscarriage – that may or may not have been caused when the father in the movie threw their maid and care worker for his elderly father out of the house for allegedly stealing. What followed was a tense movie, as the couple at the core were already planning on separating, since she wants to leave Iran, and he refused. The film brought up interesting religious, moral and cultural issues. Such issues are not really touched upon at all in The Past – true, both of the men in Marie’s life that we see are Muslim – but other than a brief moment when Ahmad’s old friend tells him “I told you before, you have to be either here or there – you have to choose” – the fact that they are Muslim, and immigrants, is pretty much beside the point. It doesn’t help that both men are pretty thinly designed characters anyway – Ahmad isn’t so much a person in this movie, as a saint, coming back from an extended period of time, and trying to help this troubled family through some difficult times (that none of the kids are his, pretty much leaves him off the hook for everything – and you have to wonder why the hell he’s putting himself through this). Mosaffa’s performance helps bring out a few layers that don’t appear to have been there in a screenplay, but he can only do so much. Rahim’s Samir is a passive character for much of the time – we cannot tell until close to the end of the movie if he cares at all about his wife in a coma, or if she’s now just an inconvenience to her. Bejo – who won the Best Actress prize at Cannes this year (although, the fact that the Spielberg led jury took the unprecedented step of insisting the two actresses from Blue is the Warmest Color share the Palme D’or that film won, I think it’s safe to assume even they didn’t think hers was the best performance in the competition) fares much better than either of her male co-stars – because she’s given more to do. Having said that, even her character is fairly one note for much of the movie – unless she’s flying into teenage girl like rages. It’s a tricky role, and for the most part Bejo handles it well – or at least as well as it could have been handled.

The bigger problem with the screenplay though is the plotting. Everything in the movie hinges of the suicide attempt and coma of Samir’s wife – and Farhadi drops in revelations about what really happened like bombs through the narrative – just as everything seems to be settling down from one explosion, another one hits, and the movie is sent reeling again. It’s effective the first few times, but Farhadi uses the device far too often throughout the film.

I realize this review is probably sounds like I hated The Past – I didn’t really, although I don’t think it’s a very good movie either. The performances are as good as they can be – I was impressed with Bejo, who shows a completely different side of herself than the one she showed in The Artist (although I do think that Marion Cotillard, who was originally cast, but had to drop out would have brought even more to the role). Mosaffa brings a nice layer or regret and grief to his role as Ahmad – I still do not believe he would subject himself to what he does in the movie, but the performance itself cannot be faulted.

 But perhaps The Past is a victim of its predecessor’s success. A Separation was such a highly acclaimed movie – and was deserving of the praise it received – that expectations were high for this one. Since Farhadi decided to work in the same vein as last time out, comparisons are inevitable – and to me, the comparison between A Separation and The Past does the later no favors.

Movie Review: A Separation

A Separation ****

Directed by: Asghar Farhadi.

Written by: Asghar Farhadi.

Starring: Peyman Moaadi (Nader), Leila Hatami (Simin), Sareh Bayat (Razieh), Shahab Hosseini (Hodjat), Sarina Farhadi (Termeh), Merila Zare'i (Miss Ghahraii), Ali-Asghar Shahbazi (Nader's Father), Babak Karimi (Interrogator), Kimia Hosseini (Somayeh).

Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation is an Iranian film, firmly grounded in that country’s societal and legal systems, and yet as the movie progresses, it becomes a more universal story. It has a fascinating moral conflict at its heart and Farhadi only gradually reveals the full implications of what has happened. Some have called the film an Iranian Rashomon, and that is accurate to a point – throughout the movie, we do get to see everything from different viewpoints and as such the assumptions we developed earlier in the movie are challenged. It is impossible, at least for me, to determine who, if anyone was right and who was wrong. The bottom line however, is that lives are destroyed.

The film opens with Nader (Peyman Moaadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) in front of a judge. They have been married for years, but now she wants a divorce. They had agreed to leave Iran to raise their daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi – the director’s real life daughter) elsewhere, but now Nader’s father has become incapacitated with Alzheimer’s. Simin does not see how this should affect their plays – half the time, he doesn’t even realize who they are, so they can put him in a home. But Nader is refusing. And because this is Iran, the husband needs to give his consent for divorce – and he also gets to decide what happens to Termeh. And Nader is adamant – Termeh is staying with him.

Simin does move out of their apartment however, which forces Nader to hire some help. He works, and he cannot leave his father home alone. He hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat), who is pregnant and has a daughter Somayeh (Kimia Hosseini) who comes with her every day to work. Her husband is unemployed, so they need the money. Razieh is strictly religious, and her new job almost immediately causes a conflict for her when Nader’s father soils himself. It’s not right that she, a married woman, would be expected to clean up another man.

Things come to a head when Nader returns home early from work one day to find his father with one arm tied to his, lying on the floor, behind a locked door barely breathing, with Razieh nowhere to be found, and apparently some money missing from a drawer. Razieh shows up a short while later, and Nader is understandably upset. He yells at Razieh and refuses to pay her. She refuses to leave, and so, he shoves her out the door – and she falls down the stairs, which causes a miscarriage. Now, everyone has to go to another court – mirroring the separation proceedings that begin the film.

All of this happens fairly early in A Separation. It is what happens after the incident that makes up the heart of the movie. Smartly, Farhadi shoots the shoving incident in such a way that it is impossible to tell who is telling the truth about it. There was physical contact, but how much? How did she fall down the stairs, which were not directly in front of the door? Did Nader know that Razieh was pregnant? He says he didn’t, but she has witnesses that can vouch for the fact that he was in the room when she mentioned it to someone else. But was he listening?

The question of guilt or innocence becomes clouded, because there is so much else going on in the movie. Nader was upset – and rightfully so – that his father was left unattended, and as a result, almost died. But why did Razieh leave? And yet, the moral puzzle at the heart of A Separation is only one aspect. There is also the class struggle. Nader and Simin are obviously middle class – upper middle class perhaps – and the difference between their home, and the home that Razieh and her angry husband live in is striking. Is the court predisposed to believe Nader because he is of higher social standing?

A Separation may seem like an odd title for this movie, because the separation between Nader and Simin takes a backseat to the court hearing about the shoving. Yet, that separation is the reason the whole thing started in the first place. Tellingly, Farhadi opens and closes the movie with the couple at court trying to sort out their separation legally. A Separation is a film that at first is seemingly simple – but the further along it goes, the deeper it gets.