The great Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi does not want to make only Iranian films. His signature films, such as A Separation and The Salesman, were best foreign language Oscar winners and were set exclusively in Iran with Iranian characters. But he’s made some really great films, some past MIFF participants, that are either set elsewhere with a couple Iranian characters (such as The Past, set in Paris), or were set elsewhere with no Iranian characters (such as Everybody Knows, which stars Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz). These felt like exciting new ventures and they provided further examples of his signature style: domestic dramas in which semantics and misunderstandings play such a central role, they almost turn the film into a thriller.
Parallel Tales cannot totally keep that sense of vigour going, and maybe that’s because it feels like “just” a French film. It’s set in Paris, like The Past, and it has no Iranian characters, like Everybody Knows. Each one by itself is okay, but the two together leave the film lacking some of what draws us to his work, and also lacking the sense of something new — in one sense.
In another sense, this is in fact new for Farhadi. Parallel Tales is an unusually high concept movie by Farhadi’s standards, a meta consideration of an ageing author, Sylvie (played by French treasure Isabelle Huppert), who is told by her ageing publisher, Celine (played by French treasure Catherine Deneuve), that her novels feel old-fashioned, and the latter will no longer publish them. This latest novel is an imagined idea of a possible love triangle between three characters in the apartment across the way, which was where the author grew up. They are foley artists, meaning they record the sound effects for atmospheric noises in movies, and they are played by French treasure Vincent Cassel and lesser known Belgian actor Virginie Efira and French actor Pierre Niney.
In Sylvie’s version of the story, two are in a relationship and the other is getting between them, and we see this imagined version of the events play out on screen. The foley artists might never have learned about Sylvie’s literary musings, which also incorporate baggage from her own childhood, if not for Sylvie’s assistant, Adam (Adam Bessa), an ex-con hired by Sylvie’s niece after a good deed in the Metro. Adam becomes obsessed with the female foley artist, Nita, and passes her the manuscript as if he wrote it – which creates real-life chaos for the people serving as inspiration for the story.
There’s a real interest to the way Farhadi has constructed this story and some of his ideas, and it pays off more as the film progresses. However, Farhadi purists will wonder as they are watching: Is he trying too hard? Farhadi is not the sort of artist who usually goes for something so cheap as a gimmick, and it’s possible, in certain moments, to wonder if this is that sort of gambit. It’s sort of miraculous to think that Farhadi could have built a whole oeuvre on desperate people working at cross purposes to each other, but he has, and those films contain a precision in the writing that is based on his keen perception of how human beings think and act, especially in challenging scenarios.
That’s not what this is. The snake eating its own tail aspect of Parallel Tales reduces some of the feel of truth we usually get from a Farhadi character, as these characters feel a bit more like constructs within his larger narrative design. Especially suffering in this regard is the character played by Adam Bessa, a French actor of Tunisian descent, whose role is naturally that of the outsider that could be filled by an Iranian. The film starts by putting us in his perspective, which we might expect since he’d be most likely to be the surrogate for Farhadi. But the writer-director seems to have the least idea of who this character is, leading to many of his actions seeming to lack an antecedent within the story. We are left feeling truly puzzled what we’re supposed to think about Adam.
Parallel Tales is loosely inspired by one of the stories in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog. And though Kieslowski is a great filmmaker to be inspired by, one also wonders if this lack of an idea that originates with Farhadi himself is one of this film’s demerits. To be sure, these demerits do not prevent Parallel Tales from being a compelling watch, as the rating below will indicate. It’s just that Farhadi here is a victim of the high bar he sets for his own work. He’s spoiled us over many MIFFs, and we are accustomed to greatness rather than mere goodness.
Parallel Tales has two more MIFF showings, once tomorrow afternoon at The Forum and once Wednesday the 19th at The Astor. Tickets can be purchased here.