THE
PAST
Godfrey Cheshire
December
20, 2013
With
"A Separation" (2011), director Asghar Farhadi made what was to
become the Iranian cinema's greatest international success, a worldwide hit
that garnered numerous high-profile awards culminating in Iran's first-ever
Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar. The film seemed to position its creator as an
artist ready to leap from Iran onto the world stage, a promise handsomely
fulfilled in its French-made follow-up, "The Past," another
brilliantly mounted drama concerning fracturing families, hidden motives and
the difficulties of attaining stability in a rapidly changing world.
Previous
Iranian directors to achieve international renown evidenced strong ties to
their nation's culture, especially its traditions in poetry, philosophy,
literature and cinema. Farhadi by contrast, who came out of the theater and has
cited influences such as Tennessee Williams, seems more readily adaptable to cultures
beyond his own. And while "A Separation," which depicted a couple
splitting up because the wife wanted to escape Iran, was viewed as a critique
of current conditions in his native land, Farhadi seems to have little interest
in politics or the kinds of cultural analyses offered in what he has called
"films that try to explain Iran to the world." The one country that
really seems to interest him is the human heart.
Of
the three main adult characters in "The Past," one is Iranian, one
French and one Arab. While it wouldn't be accurate to that these cultural
identities are entirely unimportant—Farhadi wants to register the flux of
nationalities in our increasingly globalized world—they are not the film's main
subject, any more than conditions in Iran were in "A Separation."
This time the borders that concern him most are those separating past, present
and future, and the film's title accurately pinpoints the area that threatens
to dominate and destabilize the other two.
The
story opens as Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) returns from Tehran to Paris to help his
wife Marie (Berenice Bejo) finalize their divorce. The two had lived together
in France but have been separated for several years. From the first it's
evident that there's still a skein of emotion connecting them, a mix of
residual affection and resentment, but now Marie wants to move on by marrying
Samir (Tahar Rahim), a laundry owner who has a more traumatic unresolved
relationship hovering over him: his wife, who tried to commit suicide, lies in
a coma. (The film never explains how Samir could remarry with his wife still
alive; one must assume that French law permits this in certain circumstances.)
Once
Ahmad and Marie reach her home outside Paris, we see that the adult threesome's
drama involves three children as well. Though Marie and Ahmad had no kids, she
has two daughters by a previous marriage and the elder, Lucie (Pauline Burlet),
a teenager, appears to have a warmer regard for her former stepdad than she
does for either her mom or Samir, whose relationship she disdains even though
it emerges that the couple is expecting a child. Marie's younger daughter, Lea
(Jeanne Jestin), meanwhile, has found an agreeable playmate in Samir's young
son Fouad (Elyes Aguis), who spends lots of time at Marie's house due to his
mother's hospitalization.
These
are the main human elements in Farhadi's story, and for nearly an hour, the
drama proceeds by examining in ever-greater depth the complex emotions and
concerns that connect all six characters. Then, suddenly, there's a revelation
that shifts the story to an even deeper level; it won't be the last.
Please
note that there are no spoilers ahead, because the tale's surprises deserve to
be encountered afresh. Suffice it to say that one of Farhadi's claims on being
among the world's great auteurs currently lies in his superlative skills as a
dramatist, which bring to mind not only the intricate narrative constructions
of, say, Fassbinder and Almodovar but also theatrical progenitors ranging from
Ibsen and Chekhov to Pinter.
His particular
stamp can be seen especially, I believe, in two attributes of his recent films
(including the superb "About Elly," 2009). One might be called the
"glass onion" effect. It comprises Farhadi's way of plotting his
stories so that watching them is like witnessing layer after layer of human
mystery being peeled away, with the result that we are drawn ever more deeply
into sympathizing with the characters. The concomitant attribute could be
termed the stories' multi-perspectivalism, which involves our being induced to
see things from the perspective of one character, then another, and so on,
rather than only one throughout. In "The Past" we begin viewing
Marie's fraught domestic situation from Ahmad's vantage point, which later
shifts to Marie's and later still to Samir's—with the viewpoint of the sullen,
resentful Lucie being woven in at crucial points too.
These
techniques combine to such powerful effect in large part due to Farhadi's
meticulousness as an artist. Though in "The Past" he's working in French,
a language he doesn't speak, the nuances in every line of his script seem
precisely calibrated. Likewise, though he shifts his visual approach from the
mostly handheld kineticism of "A Separation" to one of mostly static
and panning shots, the subtleties and shadings in the camerawork of Mahmoud
Kalari, one of the world's great cinematographers, beautifully support the
drama's gradually unfolding complexities.
Then
there's Farhadi's extraordinary skill with actors, which here produces not only
three strikingly modulated and complementary performances by Bejo (who won the
Best Actress prize at Cannes), Mosaffa and Rahim, but also further evidence of
Farhadi's trademark gift with young actors. All three who play the children
contribute to remarkable moments in the film, including an emotional
confrontation in the Paris Metro between Samir and his little boy that's
astonishing in both its intensity and its delicacy.
While
his drama ultimately proves so persuasive and moving because of how Farhadi
makes us understand and care about people who are torn between the lives
they've lived and ones they hope to make, an endeavor whose essential purposes
are beyond nationality and culture, there's no small resonance in the fact that
this story comes from a filmmaker transitioning between the Middle East and
Europe—regions where any chances of forward-moving dynamism seem constantly
threatened by the burdens of the past.
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-past-2013
