Cannes 2013. Passing Shots

THE PAST (ASGHAR FARHADI, FRANCE)

Written by Daniel Kasman

I had forgotten what had rubbed me the wrong way about Farhadi's A Separation, but it didn't take The Past more than five minutes before a single cut jolted my memory of the writer-director's schematic, super-literal style of filming his scripts. For such an actor-based approach—the last three films of Farhadi's being heated, nearly claustrophobic personal encounters in small spaces—The Past's lack of a sense of the cinematic freedom one can get from forming a film around the actors (rather than the other way around) is disheartening. The deliberateness of every gesture and prop, every feeling, thought and subtext spoken out loud seems a kind of humanist-realism version of Haneke's relentlessly obvious cinema. It is minus Haneke's chiding, of course, but is certainly didactic, cloaked in the “unfolding” of “drama” (in the Classical Hollywood sense of invisible form, rather than Haneke's clinical-analytic formal distance), but hitting just as many lesson-like cues. The shock cut to the film's title, like the inconsistently grandiloquent (and certainly not invisible) final sequence shot, gives away The Past's desire to constantly indicate the point of the drama. Tackling this particular story with “realism” is undoubtably a mistake even conceptually. The core turn of the story—which begins as a drama between an Iranian husband returning to France to divorce his wife so she can re-marry, and the repercussions on the children orbiting their relationship—reveals itself halfway through the film's considerable runtime to be essentially a murder mystery straight out of a gothic melodrama. The central conceit is so ridiculously over the top that the surrounding naturalistic melodrama rings off-key whenever the mystery is mentioned. Starting from that center, The Past would have felt more comfortable wearing the skin of the baroque stylings and genre of something like Lewis' My Name is Julia Ross. Even more adventurous would be to acknowledge the schematic density of its plotting and take the form of a roundelay farce (Dwan, Sturges) of ridiculous relationships hilariously congested by absurd circumstances.

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