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

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

A Prophet (Un prophete) is a French gangster film set in a prison divided largely by Corsicans and Arabs in a fight for power. Director Jacques Audiard gives a gritty and authentic look at prison life and that is full of racism and crime. The film does a good job on putting some original touches on a familiar story, making it a solid French film to see.

Malik (Tahar Rahim) is a nineteen year old who was just sentenced for six years in prison for presumably attacking cops, which he will be the first to deny. He cannot read and barely can write but can speak both French and Arabic. He comes to prison scared and timid but he does not leave that way.

Out of the blue he gets bribed with a cigarette to meet up in the yard with a man named Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup). Cesar leds the Corsican gang and acts as the Don Corleone inside the prison. Because of his Arab ethnicity, people assume he is a practicing Muslim, even though he is not. But that is precisely why he is sought after by Cesar and the Corsicans, a way to infiltrate the other Arabs.

This effectively means he is claimed by the Corsicans as part of their society. Without choice, Malik is told that he needs to kill a Muslim inmate and if he does not, he will be killed. Naturally, Malik is reluctant and had a few failed attempts to get out of it but Cesar and his men make it very clear that they run the place.

The next few scenes are incredibly intense as he is instructed as to how to kill the Muslim. They show him exactly how to strike him and even give him a razor blade to do it. He must hold the razor secretly in his mouth and wait for the right time to strike the victim directly across his throat. Horrific as those scenes may be, they ended up being the best in the entire film.

Over a year later he is still doing hacks for Cesar. It is clear that is has started to transform into a new person. The transformation is easy to see physically; as he gains some weight, his hair is longer and he even grows a mustache. But he also grows as a person; he learns how to read, speaks Corsican and is fearless.

After serving three of his six years, Cesar decides it is time for Malik to have a leave day. Which is a day where Malik is able to leave prison from 7am and stay out until 7pm. Cesar is powerful enough to pass the paperwork through the prison with priority and bypass the judge. The leave day is not for leisure however, Cesar has business for Malik to do on the outside for him.

What Malik does with his 12 hours of prison leave is not all just for Cesar though. He ends up scoring some drugs and makes plans with Ryad (a friend he met in prison) for selling it. He wisely does not tell Cesar this, as Cesar made it very clear that prison leave should only be for his business only. It is at this point that we truly see Malik creating his own independence and start to slowly drift away from the Corsicans. Cesar sees it too.

A Prophet is somewhat of a lengthy film, coming in at 155 minutes. There are parts that definitely drag on a bit, mostly in the middle act. But the beginning sucks you in and there is enough going on to get you through the middle until you come to the excellent conclusion. The film itself seemed is well constructed and carefully executed. Therefore, I was not surprised to find out that Jacques Audiard hired former convicts to his crew in order to get the real prison experience.

Audiard’s work did not go unnoticed. This film was nominated for an Oscar and an Independent Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film. It won the Grand Prize of the Jury at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and swept all of the major categories (9 in total) at the Cesar Awards, which is the French equivalent of the Academy Awards.

All said and done, A Prophet is a compelling coming of age story of a man that came from the outside world with very little and over time prison taught him how to not only read and write but the politics and economics of gangster life. It is an epic crime saga that provides a great story and amazing acting. Just be ready to devote some time for it, the 2 and a half hour runtime does drag a little bit in the middle.