'Parallel Tales' Review: Isabelle Huppert in Asghar Farhadi Drama
Isabelle Huppert and Adam Bessa in 'Parallel Tales.'
Cannes Film Festival
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Countless exceptional films have been made in which voyeurism — whether practiced by the protagonist or the audience — is a significant component. Think Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Polanski’s The Tenant, Haneke’s Caché, Coppola’s The Conversation and Powell’s Peeping Tom for starters, or at the more delectably lurid end of the spectrum, De Palma’s Body Double and Dressed to Kill. Asghar Farhadi’s elegant but frustrating Parallel Tales (Histoires parallèles) treats voyeurism as a jumping-off point to reflect on the uneasy relationship between truth and imagination. But the film keeps circling itself, with diminishing traction.
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The director and his sibling co-writer Saeed Farhadi loosely based their script on the sixth chapter of the great Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 10-part project for Polish television, Dekalog, an episode that was expanded to feature length and released theatrically in 1988 as A Short Film About Love. Running a fleet 86 minutes, that masterful feat of storytelling observes the love of a withdrawn young Warsaw post office worker for a beautiful, promiscuous woman living in an apartment directly across the street, where he watches her every night through a telescope.
Parallel Tales
The Bottom Line
An intriguing premise that becomes contorted and dull.
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, Pierre Niney, Adam Bessa, India Hair, Catherine Deneuve
Director: Asghar Farhadi
Screenwriters: Asghar Farhadi, Saeed Farhadi, freely based on Dekalog 6
2 hours 20 minutes
In a film running a lethargic 2 hours 20 minutes, the Farhadis have kept only the set-up and composer Zbigniew Preisner’s delicate but hauntingly emotional score. However, not even that exquisite music can wring much feeling from this terminally underpowered movie, which plays less like a lived-in, full-bodied story than a bloated metafiction writing class assignment.
The director of Oscar winners A Separation and The Salesman, Asghar Farhadi is a world-class artist who put his own distinctive stamp on the grown-up moral melodrama of marital and family conflict.
His new film reaches for psychological complexity, but after an intriguing start, it bogs down in fussily over-complicated plotting as it traces the escalating entanglements of crotchety novelist Sylvie (Isabelle Huppert), drawing inspiration for her next book by training a telescope on the self-possessed beauty working in a Paris apartment across the street. In her fictional construct, Sylvie names the woman Anna (Virginie Efira), after her late mother.
The problem is that all the various strands — the parallel tales — dilute our access to the characters, limiting their dimensions. One of the many strengths of the Kieślowski film is its tight focus on just two individuals, the watcher and the watched, with a couple of secondary characters hovering around the edges. When the voyeur and his subject begin physically to interact, there is low-key suspense, a hint of danger and a fatalistic romantic current fed by their growing mutual curiosity. Before he evolved into the more dream-like poetry of his later successes, The Double Life of Véronique and the Three Colours trilogy, Dekalog revealed Kieślowski to be an impeccable craftsman in the fine art of narrative distillation.
Another two or three drafts of distillation is exactly what the unwieldy Parallel Tales could have used. Sylvie is set up as the story’s fulcrum, but that role is largely usurped by Adam (Adam Bessa), a young homeless man hired by the novelist’s niece Céline (India Hair) to help pack up the apartment they co-own, readying it to be sold. Sylvie is as tetchy and aloof with Adam as she is with her niece; her monomaniacal focus on her work has allowed the place to become hopelessly cluttered and filthy, and Sylvie has zero interest in doing anything about it.
The most interesting new element Farhadi introduces is an emphasis on sound, something so often missing for the long-distance voyeur. “Anna” works as an old-fashioned analog foley artist, alongside a handsome young man the author names Christophe (Pierre Niney), adding sound effects that range from a squeaky mattress to footsteps in the sand to the gentle flapping of a bi