Review: "About Elly"

Director: Asghar Farhadi
Runtime: 119 minutes

Pitched somewhere between the ghostly mysteries of Gone Girl and Under the Sand, and the existential malaise of L'Avventura, About Elly is another stunner from Iranian director Asghar Farhadi. And even though Elly isn't technically Farhadi's most recent film, it nonetheless represents a step forward after 2013's meandering The Past. Though less pummeling in its verbal intensity than A Separation, About Elly is a steadily absorbing drama that hauntingly captures the consequences of seemingly tiny deceptions.

When Farhadi finished making About Elly, he was still several years away from taking home an Oscar for 2011's A Separation. Yet despite the former film's strong reputation and success on the festival circuit, Farhadi's (by the rest of the world) 09 film, his third feature is only now landing stateside. So, if you've been keeping track of the film since the beginning, you've had quite the wait. Whether you consider the film a member of the class of 09 or the class of 15, it belongs among the best. 

Plot-wise, Elly most closely mimics the above-mentioned Antonioni classic: a group of middle class (more emphasis on the middle in Farhadi's film) friends enjoy a relaxing weekend until one member of their party vanishes. In this case, the missing person is the titular Elly (Taraneh Alidootsi), a teacher in the company of one her student's parents, as well as their friends. Though Elly is often quite shy, she mostly gets along with her fellow vacationers. That is, until she's left to watch several of the children on the beach, and disappears, resulting in one couple's child almost drowning. 

When About Elly begins, Farhadi floods the screen with names and faces and voices. Like Elly, we feel a bit lost, even amid such charming company. Gradually, the names and faces sort themselves out, leading to a lovely scene where the ensemble plays a clumsy game of charades. This scene, fully of joking and merriment, is totally sincere, yet also cleverly deceptive. It's at this point when Farhadi shares some warmth between characters and audience members. And yet...it's also the point where the noose is stealthily dropped around one's neck. 

After gently easing the viewer in the lives of his characters, Farhadi's big moment comes in and hits like a ton of bricks. The vanishing/near-drowning sequence is wrenching, white-knuckle material, directed with great energy without slipping into mawkishness. Though About Elly continues at a steady pace, Farhadi's writing tightens that damn noose nudge by nudge, and it's riveting to witness on both an intellectual and emotional level. 

Like A Separation, About Elly could have easily been produced as a play, yet the director knows how to open his material up enough so that it can benefit from cinematic techniques. Set almost entirely in a crumbling seaside villa, the film gets considerable mileage out of characters navigating their idyllic getaway/hellish psychological prison. The villa is hardly a visually pleasing locale, but Farhadi and cinematographer Hossein Jafarian turn it into an exquisitely dynamic space as the various and sundry secrets and lies spill forward. One of the most satisfying traits of Farhadi's work is that, at its best, it acts as both an honest representation of modern Iran and a compelling, self-contained narrative. These two sides are understandably linked together, yet About Elly's script is able to elegantly weave social commentary in narrative, and vice versa. 

And as much credit as the man in the director's chair deserves, it would be silly to downplay the achievements of the ensemble. Though Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani), Elly's friend (...kinda), comes closest to main character status, About Elly is an ensemble piece at its core. The various couples (and the lone bachelor) gradually emerge as distinct personalities, and the actors all fit seamlessly into Farhadi's style. Farahani comes across as the most complex, given her connections to the missing woman of the hour, but everyone who appears on screen justifies their presence and involvement. Peyman Moadi, the phenomenal lead of A Separation, is just one of About Elly's many stellar performances that sharpens the impact of Farhadi's film to such a fine point. 

To watch a cast like this work with such harrowing, articulate material is a thing of rare beauty: each face is distinct, yet in each one we can see the entire film. Farhadi's film is most certainly about Elly, but also about each of every one of the lives affected by a deceptively simple vanishing act. Was it an act of selfish liberation or a heartbreaking tragedy? With its haunting final scenes, Farhadi suggests that, like the other elements of his film, the answer lies in the maddening void somewhere in between.

Grade: A

Review: "The Past"

Director: Asghar Farhadi
Runtime: 130 minutes

Iranian director Asghar Farhadi knows how to create compelling, naturalistic scenarios - as evidenced by 2011's A Separation - but his latest film leaves quite a lot to be desired. In A Separation, Farhadi crafted an electric look at a couple struggling to move forward in their lives. With The Past, Farhadi shifts his focus to the way past events, recent and distant, come up to haunt the present. Yet Farhadi's look at the past proves far less compelling than his previous film's portrait of the struggle to move forward. 

The solid performances and confident directing are stuck trying to sort out a script (also by Farhadi) that remains frustratingly unfocused. Though the opening scenes seem effective, albeit much quieter than A Separation's fiery arguments, they quickly give way to mundane padding. When Marie (Berenice Bejo, who picked up the Best Actress prize at Cannes back in May) picks up her ex-husband Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) at the airport, the film seems headed in the right direction. The two actors have a comfortable, lived-in chemistry that Farhadi never mishandles or over emphasizes. It may not be as attention-grabbing as Separation's opening scene, but it sets the stage nicely and avoids coming off as though Farhadi is repeating himself.

Yet once Ali settles in (he's in Paris to finalize his and Marie's divorce), The Past starts to wander off. The film runs for 130 minutes, yet the most notable stretch after the opening scene doesn't arrive until 80 minutes have elapsed. Barely anything in between begs to be examined or probed for greater depth. There are no actively bad scenes in The Past, but there are a large number of them that are barely more than functional. The writing creates occasional sparks, but nothing substantial enough to start a real fire. 

More troubling is Farhadi's meandering focus. The Past begins as Ali and Marie's story, and gradually becomes more about Ali. That is, until it no longer needs him, and jumps over to Marie and her new boyfriend Samir (A Prophet's Tahar Rahim). Later on, Marie drops off as well, leaving the film's final scraps at Samir's feet. Shifting focus across protagonists isn't inherently wrong or misguided, but The Past certainly doesn't stand as a strong example. None of the main characters feel properly anchored or fleshed out, even after several delicate secrets come to light. 

By the time the (admittedly poignant) final scene arrives, one is left wondering what on earth the point was. For a film that spends so much time attempting to build up its characters, they rarely feel whole, as though they know their time as the film's central focus is about to expire. The Past starts off promisingly enough, with a set-up filled with ideas about past and present relationships colliding with each other. But beyond that set-up, there's hardly anything worth talking about when it comes to the execution, other than the head-scratching lack of focus. 

Farhadi proved his talents as a writer with A Separation, yet his script this time around is the film's Achilles Heel, rather than its best asset. And even though The Past is never truly bad, the directing and the performances aren't enough to significantly offset the deficiencies in the writing. It's the epitome of a respectable, yet totally unremarkable middle-of-the-road drama from a writer/director who is capable of so much more.

Grade: C+

Review: "A Separation" (2011)

Certain themes in A Separation, Asghar Farhadi's widely acclaimed Iranian social drama, are, on some level, universal. Legal disputes, marital struggles, relationships between parents and children; these are all things which on some level, connect to us, whether it's on a personal or distant level. Yet what makes A Separation different, and potentially off-putting, is that the film functions as both a social drama and a look at modern Iranian society. This being the case, certain aspects - namely why characters do what they do - can be frustrating to watch, because they wouldn't be major issues in western society.

These are, however, not problems with the film, but simply issues in Iran, and to confuse them with the strength of the acting, story-telling, and writing, would be a mistake. This is an excellent, well-told story about a series of circumstances and attitudes that are so foreign to the western mindset that it's easy to label them as archaic. But in A Separation's specific case, it's not because Farhadi's writing is dumb or contrived; it's simply trying to be accurate in depicting a frustrating society. This may keep the film from being traditionally "enjoyable" in any sense, but as a striking and eye-opening piece of social film-making, its power is undeniable.

Set in contemporary Iran, the film starts off with Simin (Leila Hatami) trying to seek a divorce from her husband Nader (Peyman Moadi). She wants to leave the country with their daughter Termeh, he doesn't because of his old, Alzheimer's-afflicted father. The key problem: Simin can't leave with Termeh unless Nader leaves too, or at least gives his consent. Since he refuses, the divorce request is denied, so Simin decides to live with her parents while she continues to try and convince Nader to allow Termeh to leave. With Simin's absence, Nader hires a very religious (in contrast to the rather secular-seeming Nader and Simin), slightly squirrelly woman named Razieh (Sareh Bayat) to take care of his father while he is at work.

If this seems like enough to fill a single film, it probably is, but Farhadi keeps adding angle after angle to his expansive (yet ultimately intimate) tale. The result is a rich, often tense narrative that gives a piercing look at a world and lifestyle that is hard for anyone not from the region to fathom. In one of the most informative (and, from an objective standpoint, frustrating) scenes comes when Razieh discovers that Nader's father has soiled his pants. Yet before she goes to help him change and clean himself, she paces in thought, and then calls her imam to ask if it will be a sin to touch a man, despite the circumstances. But as strange (and even silly) as some of these actions seem, they are equally compelling and enlightening. Coupled with the rapid, high-strung dialogue exchanges, what could have been a fairly mundane domestic drama elevates itself to become an almost epic tapestry of motivations and goals. Even from the opening scene, a single near-static shot where Nader and Simin argue their cases before a judge, it's difficult not to be gripped by Farhadi's exchanges, which often occur between two diametrically opposed characters. That the dialogue is delivered with such blistering intensity by the cast doesn't hurt. What could have come off as over-written or stagey feels perfectly natural in the hands of the ensemble, especially the clashes between Nader and Simin.

Where A Separation runs into trouble is that it is so intent on using its story to paint a portrait of Iran, that is often comes off feeling academic. Gripping, yes, but still missing just that extra element of heart, the absence of which doesn't become fully apparent until after the credits have started rolling. Farhadi's characters do not lack depth, nor do they feel like puppets. At the same time, each one seems calculated to serve the plot strictly to the point of servicing the message. But the bigger issue, however, is simply that as good as Farhadi usually is at making the points he wants to make, he sometimes makes a point multiple times. The story is draining enough as it is, and the occasional repetition throws off the generally well-executed pacing and story flow.

But in the end, these quibbles do little to diminish Farhadi's achievements. Though its visceral engagement comes more on an intellectual (rather than emotional) level, its effectiveness is difficult to shake. What starts as a simple desire for a divorce gradually and elegantly evolves into a larger narrative without ever losing its emotional intimacy. It may not be an enjoyable viewing experience, nor a cinematic journey you'll be jumping up and down to take again any time soon, but it is, ultimately, important and must-see viewing.

Grade: A-/B+