the lies we tell ourselves and others
by Douglas Messerli
Asghar Farhadi (screenplay and director) درباره
الی, (Dar bāre-ye Elly) About Elly / 2009, US general release
2015
Yet
the comparison with the ground-breaking art-house film also immediately breaks
down after those few easy associations. For Farhadi’s film, as some critics
have made clear, does not have roots so much inter-continental/international
filmmaking, despite its highly artful direction, as it does with daily Iranian
life. As Godfrey Cheshire has written, this director has no intention in his
films of explaining Iran to Westerners, nor even pointing out the political
difficulties of living in Iran—although he certainly does subtly point to them.
No, this film is comfortable in its own milieu, just as are these young couples
who have known each other for years, mostly through having gone to school
together, feel at home with one another.
At
least in the beginning of the film, they speak so quickly in a Farsi argot that
even with an excellent English translation finds it often difficult to
comprehend them. It’s not that they are so much different, but actually
so much like modern young US, Mexican, European, and Canadian couples that
renders them so slightly incomprehensible. Yes, the women all wear headscarves
(a requirement in Iranian films) and, every once in a while, the men break down
in male-on-male dances unthinkable in the West, but these contemporary citizens
of Iran are almost painfully too much like us. The men immediately bond like
those in so many American comedic bromances, and the women, at first, are
shuffled off into another group to busily clean up the seaside apartment they
have had to accept after being told that the villa they had paid for is due for
a visit from its owner. Yet, husbands and wives, even allowing for the gender
separations, behave much like most such group vacationers throughout the world,
sometimes grousing about their assignments, but sharing in complex
relationships that reveal their marital situations. This might almost have been
a Hollywood-made movie demonstrating the joys and difficulties of friends recoupling
in paradise such as the same year’s release Couples Retreat.
But
beyond the first frames of this work, we already begin to perceive that here
something is amiss in a kind of Hitchcockian way that will alter all of our
expectations. First, there is the mix-up about the rooms they thought they had
rented, and then the manager’s young son—who looks like a slightly menacing
Pugsley right out of The Addams Family—sourly observes the group’s
actions, even as he opens the gate to their more than filthy digs. With
broken-out widows, they will surely be cold at night. And then there is the
continuous roar of the sea which never lets up throughout the film.
More importantly, into their tightly-knit group they have mistakenly
woven two outsiders: their former friend Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini), who has just
returned from living in Germany after divorcing his German wife, and one of
their daughter’s school-teacher Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti), whom Sepidah (Golshifteh
Farahani) has invited along with the particular intention of hooking him up
with Ahmad.
When Elly insists that she be driven into town so that she might return home by bus, the would-be matchmaker Sepidah hides Elly’s traveling bag and refuses to allow the trip, insisting she, herself, will pick up the new needed provisions alone, demanding that Elly watch the children bathing in the sea. Somewhat like the more recent film Roma, the crashing waves seem to be swallowing up these children instead of allowing them to plash in their waves. And Farhadi brilliantly plays out what we might have imagined as two of the children run back to the volley-ball playing men to report that the young boy Arash has disappeared. Basically, they ignore her until another child runs to them reporting the same information, sending them through a mad rush throughout the house before they realize Arash is lost a sea.
The long sequence in which they search for him, the camera roving back
and forth over the landscape and waves before they finally find the boy,
bringing him in and successfully resuscitating him, is an exciting piece of
cinema that reveals Farhadi’s brilliance as a director.
When the men call Alireza, who breathlessly arrives at their retreat,
they explain what has happened, the fiancé grows violent, attacking Ahmad, and
demands to talk to Sepidah. Encouraged by Amir to not tell the whole truth, she
explains, much to his distress, that Elly went willingly with them.
Implicit, obviously, is the fact that in this male-dominated culture,
her choice suggests she was willing to abandon her relationship with him. And,
in this sense, the director is hinting, if of nothing else that the gender
relationships available to his countrymen are very unfair and delimited.
Yet, given that knowledge, Sepidah’s actions and her final lie are even
more detestable, and she is obviously renounced through her actions by her
friends, even if Amir tenders forgiveness for her acts.
The final nail in her coffin comes when the police discover Ally’s body,
which has suddenly washed up on a nearby shore. Called to the morgue by the
police to identify his fiancée, Alireza breaks down, crying uncontrollably. Did
Ally deliberately drown herself for her shame in having left him? Had she
desired to leave him long ago? Was she, perhaps, attempting to save Arash? No
answers are given. The movie doesn’t need them. What began as a loving domestic
comedy has turned into a tragic outing that has forced them to all to realize
the lies they have told to each other and themselves.
Los Angeles, June 20, 2019
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June
2019).
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