Iranian director Asghar Farhadi's "The Past"
received critical acclaim.
CATEGORY:
RUSTY'S SCORE
OKLAHOMA CITY - In 2012, Asghar
Farhadi wrote and directed A Separation, which won Best Foreign
Language Film at both the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards. Farhadi’s new
film, The Past (Le Passé) is every bit as remarkable as his
last picture.
While A Separation told
the story about a married couple separating in Tehran, The Past tells
a tale of a man who travels from Tehran to Paris in order to finalize a divorce
following four years of separation from his wife. Moreover, Farhadi’s first
film, a 2009 work called About Elly, begins with a man who leaves a
marriage in Germany to return home in Tehran. Clearly, Farhadi is an artist
interested in and perhaps plagued by family dynamics, familial duty and
responsibility, lost intimacy, trust, and the complicated nature of blame when
families crumble.
In fact, even the protagonist
in About Elly and The Past are both named
Ahmad. Maybe it’s the case that Farhadi wants to express universal truths about
family breakups and Ahmads.
As for the Ahmad in The
Past, when he gets to Paris he finds that his soon to be ex-wife, Marie, is
pregnant. Not only that but the man she is seeing, Samir, is married to a woman
who, in a failed suicide attempt, has recently fallen into a coma from drinking
laundry detergent. Marie has two children from a previous marriage before she
had been wedded to Ahmad. Samir and his comatose wife have a son named Fouad.
Together, Marie, Samir, and their
three children struggle to find their stride as a some kind of new family unit
because they don’t have any footing. They don’t really know each other and so
they lack confidence and trust that being together has any purpose or meaning.
And, most of all, how are they supposed to accept their new chapter in life
together without first dealing with and coming to terms with the past? Samir’s
unconscious wife is the past. So is Ahmad.
Sure, this is the stuff that soap
operas are made of, but Farhadi has his reasons. In the end, the film’s
deliberately slow pace and carefully disclosed characters gives the audience a
sense of anxiety, suspense, mystery, and plenty to think about.
Marie and her two daughters, Lucie
and Lea, clearly miss Ahmad from the day to day minutiae of their lives. One
night, Ahmad makes dinner and Marie comments how he has always been a good
cook. So Ahmad not only feeds and nourishes the family with his meals, but he
has always provided for them and continues to provide for them a way that no
one else ever has or ever will. For Marie, Lucie, and Leah, Ahmad is stability.
He is understanding and intimacy. He is a comfort and happiness that, as of
yet, they have been unable to replace.
The Past excels in its writing, cinematography, acting, and directing. The movie,
quite simply, is one of the best pictures to be released in the last two years.
One of the real strengths of the film is that nearly all of its characters are
to blame. Everyone is complicit. That’s what makes it real. It takes a labor of
love and painstaking effort to make something like The Past, where
the bad guys are just like the audience, just like us.
Marie’s new boyfriend, Samir, owns
a laundry cleaning business where even his employee is partly to blame for the
conflicts the characters are trying to resolve. The message seems obvious:
dirty laundry is dirty laundry and everyone has to wear it.
There’s no escaping the soot, dirt, grime, even blood stains, that we have
given each other.
When Ahmad arrives from to Paris,
Marie picks him up at the airport and Marie’s windshield wipers, as they
operate, wipe away the opening titles. But this isn’t enough. This will never
be enough. There is no expunging the past. When we try, on the other side, we
are still intact and sitting quietly on the other side. With nothing resolved.
Similarly, at Marie’s house, all
the characters must be cautious of touching the walls because Samir has
been painting and his layer of paint is still wet. Samir and Marie’s
relationship is still vulnerable. Samir’s fresh paint will never cover the past
of Ahmad.
No matter how much we want the
past to go away it is right beneath the surface. It is a part of us. In fact,
it’s important to remember the kids were never even Ahmad’s own offspring. They
are the daughters of a man who the audience never sees, so beneath the layer of
paint that Samir is trying to cloak is yet another layer of The Past.
http://www.reddirtreport.com/rustys-film/film-review-“-past”
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