thepastsliderMuch like his previous film, the Oscar-winning A Separation, Asghar Farhadi’s The Past plays out in front of us as if we are flies on the wall bearing witness to intimate domestic drama. No score, no intercutting, straight-on shots with virtually no camera movement. All that’s left is the story and the way it’s acted. If either of these elements falters, viewers are in for two hours of tedium.
Fortunately, Farhadi has his aesthetic ducks in a row, with a solid script and a cast that never lets him down. But is this enough to create compelling art?
It’s been four years since Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) left France and Marie-Anne (Bérénice Bejo). At her behest he’s at last come back to finalize their divorce so she can marry Samir (Tahar Rahim).
Obviously, this sounds like the set-up for a love triangle, but the plot is far more complicated. First there’s Lucie (Paulina Burlet) and Léa (Jeanne Justin), Marie-Anne’s daughters of a husband prior to Ahmad. High-school-aged Lucie can’t stand to be in the same house as Samir. Then there’s Samir’s son Fouad (Elyes Aguis), who just eight months ago witnessed his mother’s suicide. At least “suicide” is how everyone generally refers to it: technically she’s still alive, sustained by a bank of hospital equipment.
As the film progresses, yet more complications are revealed. See, attempting fully to account for and reconcile ourselves with the past is tricky business. And through The Past, Farhadi invites us to consider whether we are always best served by doing so.
While A Separation is not about Iran per se, that it takes place in Iran, is written in Persian, and is easily the most internationally acclaimed Iranian film in history made it tough to forget that this was the work of an Iranian. Considering that The Past takes place in France, is almost completely in French, and features Iranian characters whose ethnicity is of only peripheral interest to the plot, it seems as if Farhadi is almost consciously asking us to think of him not as an Iranian filmmaker, but simply as a filmmaker.
asgharfarhadi250257So perhaps he won’t be offended if we overlook the fabulous strides he’s made for Iranian cinema and say that, however solid his films have been to this point, perhaps there’s something a bit flat in his craft. Like Farhadi, Michael Haneke’s aesthetic tends toward the verisimilar—no score, no intercutting, etc. But Farhadi’s shots never seem as compellingly framed as Haneke’s, and his scripts are neither as documentarily riveting nor as cerebrally conceived.
It’s no great insult to 41-year-old Farhadi to say he’s not yet risen to Haneke’s heights. But because The Past is every bit as good as A Separation and yet has received nowhere near the same level of acclaim, Farhadi may need to raise his game to those lofty heights to ever again see the kind of praise he received for A Separation, a film undoubtedly overhyped because of its culture of origin.
Barring tragedy, Farhadi has a long career ahead of him in which to try to meet the challenge. And as a filmmaker who doesn’t seem to be looking for any favors based on his nationality, it will be interesting for the rest of us to chart his progress.
http://greaterlongbeach.com/11/02/2014/the-past-farhadis-first-post-oscar-film-looks-at-looking-back