There’s a part of being the victim of infidelity that isn’t often discussed: the suspicion of infidelity. Unlike the flare of rage that comes with the surprise of catching a cheat, suspicion envelops the mind slowly like quicksand, pulling an already fragile psyche deeper and deeper into the abyss until there’s nothing left but suspicion itself. Innocuous happenings become something more, something ominous, but they never quite manifest into damning evidence. All they do is fuel more suspicion, because if that last thing was almost proof, the next thing surely will be proof. Suspicion creates a lot of smoke, but usually without ever producing the gun. In Asghar Farhadi’s Fireworks Wednesday, the suspicion of infidelity wreaks havoc on the psyche of a woman in Tehran.

Rouhi (Taraneh Alidoosti) is a beautiful young bride-to-be whose wedding won’t pay for itself, so she takes a temp role as a cleaning woman for a family of three. On her first day on the job, Rouhi finds herself dealing with more than messy rooms and dirty windows. The husband and wife who have hired her—Morteza (Hamid Farokhnezhad) and Mozhde (Hediyeh Tehrani)—appear to be on the last legs of their marriage as they ferociously argue in front of their new hire about how Morteza broke his promise to have a serious talk with Mozhde about their future so he could go to work on his day off. Mozhde sees this not only as a slight but as a sign that her husband is having an affair. Mozhde recruits Rouhi to spy on Morteza, but even that grows into something more than she signed up for.

Other than the glow from the soon-to-be-wed Rouhi, the first thing that becomes a constant presence in Fireworks Wednesday is the perpetual hum of chaos. The film takes place on Persian New Year when fireworks go off in the streets all day and night (seemingly by everyone in town). The constant bursts of noise sound like a military skirmish, creating a low-level hum of aural unease. This sets the film’s tone, acting as a celebration and a backbeat for the unfolding drama.

The highlight of the film is Farhadi’s construct of, and Tehrani’s portrayal of, Mozhde. The chaos in the streets outside and in the apartment inside are nothing compared to the chaos in Mozhde’s psyche. She starts out as angry, a woman defending her marriage and not feeling the same level of commitment from her husband to save it. But that anger is ultimately powered by suspicion, and when her husband is at work, that suspicion tears her down as it builds itself up. Every number on caller ID, every conversation overheard through the apartment’s ventilation system, every other randomly discovered factoid that doesn’t feel quite right becomes more smoke without a gun. Like a person with a terminal illness begging for a mercy-killing, Mozhde simply wants relief from her pain. Without saying it, she knows that relief will only come with discovering the worst because there’s no way of disproving her suspicion. In an effort to expedite that relief, she enlists Rouhi’s help.

Poor Rouhi. The young girl only knows love and happiness with her man, not whatever it is Morteza and Mozhde have. But over the course of only one day, Rouhi shifts from bystander to witness to full-on participant in a very messy domestic game, and in the process learns about the frailty of marriage, the criticality of communication, the trickery of deceit, and the importance of honesty. It’s a wedding gift no one intended to give her, and one she shouldn’t try to return.

Put it all together and the director of A Separation and The Past has done it again, crafting an excellent exercise in weathering sustained chaos. There are early moments when the film doesn’t have the steam it should, but once it gets going it plays almost like a psychological thriller, although one stripped of that genre’s tropes. Tension mounts, characters evolve, and secrets are revealed. Yet even with all that, and with the ominous sense of discovery forever looming overhead, nothing is ever overwrought or overplayed. Fireworks Wednesday was first released in Iran in 2006. After a decade-long wait, the film is finally receiving a release in the US.

Anyone who is a fan of Oscar winning A Separation, and the work of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi will want to see About Elly. It is a masterclass in both storytelling and film making. Farhadi is a multi-award winning director and not without reason; one of those reasons is his brilliance in the art of deception and illusion. He has the gift of deceiving us into believing we are watching a simple slice of Iranian life but all the while he is planting seeds that will grow and eventually come to maturity and fruition in the most unexpected and enlightened of ways.

About Elly, superficially at least, is a story about a group of 30 something middle class Iranians, who together with their children take a 3 day break from life in Tehran to travel north up to the Caspian Sea for some sun, fun and relaxation. Unbeknown to the main group trip organizer, Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani) has been playing matchmaker. She plans on introducing her daughters apparently singleton teacher Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti) a stranger to the main group, to the recently divorced Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini).

What is striking from the opening scenes is the tremendous unity and strength within the group which cannot be shaken even when they are informed the accommodation is double booked. Trip organizer Sepideh resolves the issue by gaining the sympathy of to the site owners with a little white lie, explaining that Elly and Ahmad are newlyweds and the group are then offered alternative arrangements.

Spirits are high and the friends democratically vote to accept the offer of the apartment and then decide amongst themselves who will be responsible for cleaning as the new apartment is unkempt and in desperate need of a clean. This setback is only a minor inconvenience and serves to increase the togetherness and harmony of the group. The togetherness of the group is further strengthened with the sharing of the main meal and participation of all in an after dinner game of Charades.

The apparent harmony is short lived when the very next morning an unforeseen incident sets about a dynamic that will tear the tranquility and cohesion of the group apart. What has on the surface appeared to be a straightforward even simple tale of a group of friends on a short holiday quickly evolves into a tale of mystery, tragedy, conspiracy, hope and despair now set against a backdrop of the higher and more culturally important issues of morality and honor.

For anyone not too familiar with Iran and its culture, outside of TV newsreels, like myself, About Elly will challenge any assumptions you may have about life in a modern theocratic Iran. Yes, there is a deep regard for spiritual life and the clear divide between men and women remains. There are a couple of powerful examples within the film which highlight this same point. The first is when Sepideh risks her own life by diving into the sea in full dress including hijab. It is noticeable the young boy removes his tee shirt to go bared top without a second glance. The second is when the group are debating and judging the good name of Elly within the context of morality and honor. There clearly is more than a hint of a suggestion that it is perhaps better for a woman to be dead than suffer dishonor.

At the same time, Farhadi gives us more than enough glimpses that the times are a changing for at least some middle class women. The very democratic nature of the group. Women challenging their husband’s decisions, making decisions not solely on the basis of child rearing and domesticity. Within this liberal group there is no call to prayer 5 times daily making religion less suffocating and embracing.

With numerous awards and nominations behind it, About Elly deserves to be given consideration and attention by all serious fans of World Cinema. For nearly 2 hours Farhadi has us mesmerized, captivated, our eyes glued to the screen while he works his unmistakable brand of magic. About Elly is truly a cinematic experience to savior.

This review was originally published on 9/18/12. Cinema Guild released About Elly to US audiences on April 8th.

Garnering heaps of positive buzz (and awards) after running through a slew of festivals is Asghar Farhadi’s sixth film, The Past. Farhadi earned Iran’s first Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film with his 2011 release, A Separation, and looks to be continuing a similar level of excellence with his new film.

Ahmad (Ali Mossa) arrives in Paris to finalize a divorce with his estranged wife, Marie (Bérénice Bejo), who is currently living with her two daughters (not Ahmad’s), new paramour (Tahar Rahim) and his young son. The film looks deliciously melodramatic, relying on tensions not only between lovers old and new, but from eldest daughter Lucie (Pauline Burlet).

If you’re looking forward to watching Bejo’s Cannes award winning performance (like me), it’ll be hitting theaters in LA and New York December 20th with a wider release to follow.

Watch the trailer for The Past

The first thing that came flooding back into my mind the moment I arrived in Toronto for TIFF was the only thing fest-goers do more than watching movies: waiting. If you want to come to TIFF be prepared to get in line. In fact, with the addition of a “Virtual Waiting Room” in TIFF’s ticket purchasing page, you can do your waiting at home too!

After all my waiting online to get the tickets I wanted, I finally arrived to…wait in a line to pick up the tickets I bought. Once I got my tickets, I victoriously arrived to the theatre and…waited in another line for the film. But standing around and waiting is just as essential to TIFF as catching 3-4 films in a day or running around downtown to catch the next screening. There’s always someone to talk to in line as well, as people at the festival will be some of the friendliest film lovers you’ll meet. Where else can you casually chat with a stranger about Derek Cianfrance before switching topics to the Wavelengths lineup without missing a beat?

That’s exactly what I did with some people in line before sitting down to watch The Past. Asghar Farhadi’s film has already been reviewed for the site by Jansen, but as I wanted to see it badly since Cannes (and also because Blue is the Warmest Colour is one of the hardest films to get into this year) I took the chance to catch it. Anyone who has seen Farhadi’s last film A Separation will know what to expect here. It shares more than a few qualities with his previous film (Couple divorcing? Check. Use of walls and glass as barriers to communication? Check), but it’s still rich and compelling material.

The Past

I’ll keep plot details to a minimum. The Past begins with Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) returning to Paris from Tehran so he can officially divorce his wife Marie (Berenice Bejo). They’ve been separated for several years, and he came at her request. The first of the film’s many revelations begin when Ahmad discovers that Marie is not only engaged to another man, played by A Prophet’s Tahar Rahim, but he’s living with her along with his son from another marriage. When Marie asks Ahmad to help find out why her teenage daughter Lucie (Pauline Burlet) is acting rebelliously, he begins to find out details about Marie’s new relationship that begin to tear everyone in the film apart.

Farhadi’s exploration of how his characters are trying to break free from their respective past lives and/or decisions is fascinating, and made all the better by his cast. Bejo, who won Best Actress at Cannes this year for her role, works wonders at making Marie an empathetic character (a lesser actress would have made Marie hard for the audience to like or understand). Tahar Rahim also does a great job with such a subdued character, but the real star is Mosaffa. Ahmad is the heart of the film, and Mosaffa plays the part so well that he’s missed whenever he spends extended periods off-screen.

Unfortunately, when Ahmad does seemingly vanish in the final act, The Past takes a slight dip in quality. Up to that point the focus stayed on Marie, Ahmad and Lucie, but the narrative suddenly switches over to Rahim’s character. Rahim does a fine job, and the way some of the film’s final mysteries unravel makes for a gripping watch, but his character simply isn’t as compelling as Marie and Ahmad.

Nonethless, The Past is still a very good film with an excellent screenplay (don’t be surprised if Farhadi picks up another Oscar nomination for this) and direction. As excellent as Farhadi’s writing is the film’s best moment, where Bejo and Rahim drive home after buying chandeliers, doesn’t have a single word spoken in it.

RATING: 7.5

Manakamana

Next up is Manakamana, the new project by Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab. In my coverage last year, I was blown away by the SEL’s documentary Leviathan. While that film was so excellent at making the forces of nature look otherworldly, Manakamana goes in the opposite direction. Despite its patience-testing format it’s one of the most humanist films I’ve seen all year. People who stick with it will find a documentary whose portrayal of the banal makes for some truly fascinating viewing.

Read full review of Manakamana

Next up:

More Cannes catch-up, this time with Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive followed by Like Father, Like Son which we said was the best film at Cannes this year. Also, I desperately try to get into The Double but don’t get my hopes up. Check back in the coming days to see if I end up catching Richard Ayoade’s latest, or some other film that was playing at the same time.

For many (myself included), the work of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi was relatively unfamiliar before a little film called A Separation rode on a huge wave success; from unprecedented victory in every major category at the Berlinale Film Festival, to an Oscar for Foreign-language feature a whole year later. As a result, worldwide audiences were exposed to a kind of intellectually, culturally and morally even-handed cinema marked by a direct visual approach and equally balanced, literate screenwriting. To those who have yet to see the director’s About Elly — where a L’Avventura-esque mystery eventually reveals itself as an incisive and finally humane look at contemporary Iranian society — I cannot recommend it enough. But by the same token, About Elly’s embryonic formal and tonal strategies for what would later blueprint A Separation become clear in hindsight. The lingering question on the minds of most remained whether such clarity and slow-burning intricacy in Farhadi’s stories could persist in absence of the intricate nuances of Iranian life he obviously knows so well. Farhadi’s answer to that is The Past (Le Passé).

Set in Paris, The Past opens on Marie (Bérénice Bejo, The Artist), a French woman grappling with her myriad of relationships at various points of burgeoning and disintegration. Chief among them is the visit from her husband Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa), who is returning to France to sign divorce papers after four years back in his native Iran. Complicating matters more, Marie plans to marry Samir (Tahar Rahim, A Prophet), whose child she is pregnant with. Both Marie and Samir bring children from previous romances to densify the relational web Farhadi spins, and as the story progresses Marie’s eldest, Lucie (Pauline Burlet) plays an especially pivotal role as we learn of her possible involvement with Samir’s present wife, who is eight months comatose. All of that sounds cinematically heightened because it is. But unlike the matters of faith and custom that so drove the dramatic urgency of his earlier work, Farhadi here seems to relish the opportunity to take an otherwise melodramatic premise and make it agonisingly, persistently relatable, regardless of cultural context.

It’s not my aim to delve too much into the plot, as many of The Past’s pleasures are drawn not merely from the revelations that Farhadi offers (stunning as they are), but the simultaneous deftness and weight with which he announces them: the director’s inherent ability to doubly affect our minds and hearts, to wring empathy from the brink of apathy, is so evident through The Past’s deliberate 130 minutes. The escalating tension that A Separation played straight and fast is here rendered rather more exponentially: curiosities and twists in the narrative are slower to creep in and more pronounced in their unraveling. This has led some to criticise the third act that plays overtly dramatic, but the crescendo that forms is a result of a more patient, more measured setup—so it’s only natural that once those emotional blows arrive, they seem to land harder.

Farhadi is helped in sticking said moments by an ensemble of performances that play like a well-pitched orchestra, Burlet and Elyes Aguis (as Samir’s young son Fouad, quietly absorbing each familial interaction to form his own worldview of death and consequence) offering breadth beyond their years; Bejo’s elastic, rangy Marie providing sharp contrast to both her silent, charming breakout role in The Artist and her co-star Rahim. In the thankless role of the imposing fourth wheel to an existing (though fractured) family unit, Rahim takes his one-dimension and makes it many, playing Samir’s troubled fatherhood, splintered devotions and not inconsequential guilt in a manner so implicitly interiorized that it’s perhaps the most impressive part of the film.

For all the histrionics that threaten to topple The Past overboard, Farhadi ends the film on a contemplative note that revisits (no pun intended) the multiple thematic readings of its aptly abstract title. It gives away nothing to reveal that the closing scene features Samir at his wife’s bedside, speaking though he knows she can’t hear, and asking though he knows she can’t do — a silent, microcosmic moment that flawlessly summarises the film, yet leaves audiences in perpetual wonderment. If my party line here is that The Past is great precisely because it isn’t overly indebted to A Separation, then I’m thankful that they still share instances of Farhadi’s profound ability to close a movie out.

The Past trailer