158. Iranian film director Asghar Farhadi’s French language film “Le passé” (The Past) (2013): Offering the flipside of Farhadi’s ‘A Separation’ with some parallels to Ray’s ‘Charulata’

The title of a movie often provides a vital clue for a viewer to approach and analyze a film.

In Asghar Farhadi’s latest work The Past, there are several pasts on review:  the past life of the Iranian Ahmad (Ali Mostaffa) and his French wife Marie (Bérénice Bejo) now about to sign divorce papers; the past life of Marie who had lived with a gentleman we never see on screen but is currently living in Brussels and is definitely the father of Lucie (Pauline Burlet) and possibly of even of Lea; the past life of Samir (Tahar Rahim) whose wife Celine is in a coma after a botched suicide attempt, and is a husband-in -waiting  for a pregnant Marie after she divorces Ahmad. These pasts are never shown in the film; the viewer has to flesh out these pasts from bits of dialog in the film as it progresses.  The pivotal point for all the three “pasts” revolves around one individual Marie. She is the one seeking a divorce.  She is the one who has two husbands living under one roof, one a man who is going to be her husband and another a husband who is going sign her divorce papers. It is interesting to note that in both the Farhadi films, it is the wife wanting a divorce, though in both films the wife seems to care for the husband in indirect ways and the husband's seemingly stubborn actions seems to have led to the current situation.

The pasts in the film The Past are developed by the screenplay writer/director Farhadi  in multiple ways. The relationship of Marie towards Samir is captured by a stunning remark by Marie’s daughter to Ahmad “You know why she went to that jerk? Because, he reminded her of you.” Both Ahmad and Samir do resemble each other physically. Both are Muslims who married French women. Both seem to want to leave their respective wives at a later point in their lives.

And at a crucial point in the film, the third unseen “past “, that of Samir’s life with Celine, is recaptured briefly in the film using the effect of smell of the perfume Samir wore when he was with Celine.

'Something unresolved when two people fight after 4 years of separation'

In an interesting visual metaphor, Marie’s “house” is under renovation which includes painting to fixing of leaky kitchen sinks. The Pastoffers a flipside of Farhadi’s earlier work Nader and Simin: A Separation, where a resolute wife was separating from a distraught husband—a film in which two sets of husbands seemed to be in lesser control of their lives than their respective wives. In both films, the Iranian men prefer to stay in Iran.  Interestingly A Separation had the Iranian actress Leila Hatami in the strong and practical wife’s role of a wife seeking a divorce; in The Past, Ms Hatami’s real life husband plays the strong and level headed husband Ahmad agreeing to a divorce. Director Farhadi is mastering the technique of flipping/mirroring roles on film and in reality from film to film.

Glass barriers separate sound and total communication in the opening
sequence of The Past 

The collaboration of Farhadi and Iranian cinematographer Mahmoud Kalari  on the two films has been a major factor in the success of the two movies. The final scene of A Separation has a glass panel that impedes the crucial spoken words of the daughter of divorced parents to the magistrate from reaching the parent’s ears, while the opening scene of The Past has glass panels of the international airport impeding proper aural communication. The end of A Separation suggests the social fracture between husband and wife has been formalized while in the end scene of The Past the social fracture of one couple seems to be healing. Farhadi is deliberately flipping the story and the coin at different levels. In The Past’s opening scene words are not spoken or heard and in the final scene, too, the communication is limited to the visual, the olfactory, and the body language. Farhadi has honed his skills as a director and scriptwriter, improving as he goes along from film to film.

The perfect father and house-husband

In both films, the children or the offspring of the adults born and unborn play pivotal roles during the screen time of the two films in determining the outcomes. Samir’s son Fouad asks his dad an inconvenient question while riding the metro “Where is home?” as he has lived in two homes, one with his real mother Celine and another with his foster-mother-in-waiting, Marie.  Thus, both the Farhadi movies explore the effects of divorce/separation on adults and children of the adults.

Both films are equally tales of lies that leave a deep impact on different sets of marital lives. For an Iranian like Farhadi, the tenets of marriage are important and sacred, while in France even Muslims like Samir (an inference one draws from the names Samir and Fouad) seem to disregard those tenets.

Asghar Farhadi’s cinema really came to fore after he made About Elly (2009) as his earlier work Fireworks Wednesday pales in comparison both in content and in style. For Indian viewers, About Elly is similar to a tale filmed by an Indian director Mrinal Sen adapted from a short story by Ramapada Chowdhury. The Indian film in Hindi film was called Ek din Achanak (One day suddenly) (1989) which competed at the Venice Film Festival some 20 years ago and even received an honorable mention from the jury. Like Elly disappears in About Elly, in Ek din Achanak, a professor and head (played by Dr Shreeram Lagoo) of a family, that included his two daughters and a son, suddenly disappears without explanation or trace. That Mrinal Sen film had also developed a parallel story to that of Farhadi’s script.

Now The Past, yet again, has an end scene that recalls the end scene of yet another Indian film of repute—this time the Bengali  maestro Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (The Lonely Wife)(1965), winner of the Silver Bear for director Ray at the Berlin film Festival. Both films end with the crucial handshake/touching of hands between husband and wife that is deliberately left ambiguous by the respective directors. In both the Indian and the Iranian films, the respective husbands realize their “past” mistakes in their relationships to their respective forsaken wives and try to reaching out to them with their hands in the end scenes. Ray’s Charulata was based on the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s tale The Broken Nest.

Despite the uncanny similarities to two famous works of Indian cinema, the increasing mastery of Farhadi’s screenplay writing abilities is nothing but awesome, considering that he achieves these feats alone without the assistance of a co-scriptwriter.  In The Past, Ahmad’s missing bag on arrival at the airport might appear an innocuous detail—it is common occurrence to flyers worldwide. But the missing/broken bag for scriptwriter Farhadi is a prop for developing the narrative of how Ahmad and Samir differ in dealing with kids who are inquisitive about the contents of a bag when they might contain gifts for them and others in the family. The bag also serves as a metaphor for the affection of Ahmad towards Lea (whose biological father’s identity is blurred in the script) at a time when social ties are about to be broken by an impending divorce. It is a baggage of the “past” connections to the family. But during the car ride from airport to Marie’s home when Ahmad brings up a past detail, Marie cuts him off “It’s not important..I don’t want to go back in to the past.” By a contrast, while Marie wants to forget the past, all the three kids yearn to retain past memories (Lucie and Lea of the time with Ahmad, and Fouad of the time with Celine in his earlier home). In all his later films, Farhadi ensures that his final scene in his scripts are enigmatic and open ended ensuring the viewer has to reflect on Farhadi’s work even after the movie is over to understand it properly. That’s cinema for mature audiences.

In comparison to A Separation, Farhadi’s next work The Past, offers a viewer a structured comparison of the western attitudes and Iranian attitudes.  Consider the following discussion between Marie and Ahmad on her relationship with her future husband and father of he unborn child:

  Ahmad: When did you meet each other?

  Marie: In the drugstore. He came to get his wife's medicines.

  [Ahmad sneers]

  Marie: What?

  Ahmad: In our culture, it is laughing.

  Marie: But in our culture, it is mocking!

For those who missed the point, Farhadi is ironically looking at the start of an illegitimate extramarital relationship when a husband is trying to help his own wife recover from an unspecified illness. Farhadi in The Past actually improves on what he had achieved in A Separation by incorporating additional perspectives of cultural differences beyond the effects of lies and the processes of a divorce on varied characters. Several bits of conversation in the film point to Ahmad’s inability to adjust to life in France as the reason that cost his marriage.  But has the marriage really been torn apart?  A detail of the spoken words in the film indicates otherwise.  The gynecologist discussing Marie’s pregnancy states philosophically “In this situation, every certainty is a doubtful!”  Equally loaded is Samir’s comment about Marie and Ahmad: “When two people see each other after 4 years and still fight together, it shows that there is something unresolved between them.”

Marie: a crucial figure in the three "pasts" presented 

Finally, a word about the citation of the award the Ecumenical Jury at Cannes Film Festival bestowed The Past quoted John 8:32 from the Bible “The truth shall set you free.” If one examines the film closely when the lies are exposed, broken marriages begin to heal and reconciliation starts. It is, therefore, surprising that the Oscars, which honored Farhadi’s A Separation, did not even nominate The Past, a more complex but superior work on several fronts including its acting performances, camerawork, screenplay, and direction.

P.S. The film won the Best Actress Award for Bérénice Bejo and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at Cannes film festival; the Best Screenplay Award at the Durban film festival, the Best Foreign Language Film of National Board of Review (USA), and the Best Audience Award at Oslo film festival. The film is on the author’s list of his top 10 movies of 2013. Farhadi’s A Separation and About Elly have been reviewed earlier on this blog.

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124. Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev’s “Elena” (2011): The third riveting film from a talented filmmaker who makes any perceptive viewer sit up and enjoy layers of meaning

Designer Sam Smith's favorite poster of the film/(courtesy MUBI)

Andrei Zvyagintsev is one of the most interesting among active filmmakers today. He has only made three feature films. Each of those three films is built, to put it in literary terms, on the scale of a novella rather than an epic novel. Each film delves with aspects of family bonding—or at least that provides the least common factor for the tales, only to multiply and amplify on aspects of an individual’s life beyond the family, subjects often relating to psychology, politics, sociology and religion. And that is what makes any Zvyagintsev film interesting—its universality and its inward looking questions, all open ended for the viewer to ponder over after the movie gets over. And Elena is true to that spirit.

Famous Russian novels (later made into films) often had for their titles mere names—Anna Kareninaor Dr Zhivago. But those novels went beyond those ordinary names. (A few US films, such as Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, also used ordinary individual’s names at titles of movies.)  This is the case of Elena, the movie. Elena is the lead character, an ordinary individual. Yet, she represents much more than a simple individual. She represents a social class, a generation, and the mother hen of a family. She combines diametrically opposing elements of the angelic Florence Nightingale and a cool, calculated villain. Like a Karen Crowder (played by Tilda Swinton) in Michael Clayton, you can spot Elenas in our society.

The basic story of Elenais of a humble matronly nurse who marries a rich man, taking care of his needs from hospital, where they first met during a hospitalization, to his elegant home in the evening of his life. The obvious strand of the story is the social disconnect between husband and wife, even though both are content and obviously need each other. The woman needs the money and social standing of her husband, and the man needs a woman for companionship and personal care and to manage his upscale apartment. The rich man has a “hedonistic” daughter from a previous marriage, who still loves her father in an aloof manner and lives her own life far from the “family”. The father, in contrast, cares for the prodigal daughter and is concerned about her future, while he is least concerned about his wife’s progeny.

Elena has her own brood, from a previous marriage. A son, a daughter-in-law, and a grandson with limited means and ability, who seem to survive on Elena’s financial contributions, constitute the other branch of the family tree. After the initial introductions of the state of Elena's extended family, the story of Elena the movie takes off to a higher altitude as the drama progresses from the preliminaries into intrigue culminating in an ending that will make an intelligent viewer ponder over the various events in the film.

To assess the film as a mere tale of two social classes in modern-day Russia would be missing the wood for the trees. It is indeed a tale of the “invasion of the barbarians”—an original title Zvyagintsev had toyed with using. The sharp contrast of the overhead shot of the rich old man in his bed early in the film, with the overhead shot of Elena’s grandchild lying in the center of an oversized bed is only one layer of the rich screenplay of Elena.

If a viewer thought the film was a tale on class inequalities in Russia, it would be relevant to hear what the director has to say on the film.  To quote Zvyagintsev from Elena’s press kit: “This is a drama for today, told in a modern cinematographic language subjecting the viewer to eternal questions about life and death. A monster disguised as a saint, a repenting sinner facing her idols in a temple — how is that for an image of the Apocalypse? The Devil is powerless when he stands before the face of God. Man is powerless in the face of Death. And God is powerless in the face of Man’s freedom of choice. Humanity holds the key to the future of this trinity.”Now, this critic has always held the view that Russian directors like Tarkovsky, Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, and Zvyagintsev are deeply religious individuals (having grown up in the traditions of Russian Orthodox Church) and their cinema betrays their theological bent even though traditional images of worship rarely appear on the screen in their cinematic works. In Elena, there is a brief sequence of Elena praying but it is fleeting. At a critical point of the film, the train on which Elena is travelling kills a horse on the railway tracks.  A horse killed in an accident might appear insignificant to many. Not so to a Russian filmmaker like Zvyaginstsev who loves to use Tarkovsky-like images of horses one recalls in Solyaris and Andrei Rublyev. For Zvyagintsev and for Tarkovsky, the white horse is a symbol of purity and grace. And the killing of a horse in Elena suggests the fall from grace. The context has to be understood by the viewer.  So is the electrical power failure or outage in Elena’s son’s apartment on Elena's second visit. In Zvyagintsev’s The Return, other Tarkovskian metaphors like the sudden rains were brought into focus.

In Elena, the opening shot is of an apartment viewed from outside, from the perspective of a tree branch. There is a long silence until it is broken by a cry of a bird, a hooded crow (Corvus cornix), if my knowledge of ornithology holds good. The shot of the bird and its cry, are harbingers of the varied metaphors strewn around the film. A crow is never considered a good omen. When the rich man takes out his costly sedan to drive to go to his regular swimming pool, he has to stop his car for a stream of workers who cross the road. Any Zvyagintsev film ought to be enjoyed like solving a crossword puzzle. Every shot is loaded with a silent commentary. The obvious story line of the rich versus the poor is obvious for the less interested viewer.  However, Zvyagintsev has presented through Elena his concern for the diminishing ethical, moral and spiritual values in of the post-glasnost Russia of today.

Zvyagintsev’s choice of subjects and the writer(s) to build his three films gives an insight into the man. His first film The Return was based on a little known Russian duo, who wrote TV scripts. Collaborating with Zvyagintsev, opened up their careers to work later with the talented Nikita Mikhalkov on the Oscar nominated film, 12, loosely based on The Twelve Angry Men. Zvyagintsev moved on to American writer William Saroyan for his next film The Banishment. He used the skills of two other lesser known Russian screenplay writers, Artom Melkumian and Oleg Negin. Between the two writers and Zvyagintsev, Saroyan’s work was transformed into a slightly different tale with so much added punch. He cleverly dropped the Saroyan title of The Laughing Matterand called it by the loaded title The Banishment. Zvyagintsev persisted with Negin on his third film Elena. What Melkumian and Negan did to reshape the Saroyan tale, is accentuated by Negan in Elena, with a host of symbols and metaphors that transport a simple tale of a family into the world of contemporary politics, ethics, social changes and religion. The women characters in all the three Zvyagintsev films are interesting studies: they live to serve men. In Elena, the main female character drives the story-line, even though she lives to serve, first her husband and subsequently her son.

Zvyagintsev’s debut film The Return has all the trappings of the elements that made Andrei Tarkovsky tick and the structured layers of meanings that the film offered were mindboggling. That debut won him the Golden Lion at Venice film festival and 27 other awards worldwide. His second film The Banishment won the Best Actor prize at Cannes film festival. His third work Elena won him the Jury prize at Cannes in the Un Certain Regardsection, the Grand Prize of the Ghent international film festival and the Silver Peacock for the Best Actress at the Indian International Film Festival, Goa.

These honors themselves indicate that Zvayagintsev is a director who can pick good actors and derive great performances from them. In the first two films, he stuck with actor Konstantin Lavronenko for the main role. He was able to transform an actor with three low profile Russian films into an internationally recognizable actor. For his second film, he chose the talented Norwegian/Swedish actress Maria Bonnevie over Russian actresses and the lady delivered a smashing low-key performance. In Elena, a TV actress Nadezhda Markina was catapulted into role that won her a Silver Peacock and the best actress award at the Asian Pacific Screen awards.

Zvangintsev’s cinema cannot be appreciated sufficiently if one does not notice his constant cinematographer Mikhail Krichman who went on to win a Golden Ossella at the Venice Film Festival for his cinematography in another remarkable recent Russian work Silent Souls (2010). Krichman’s amazing ability to make nature and the natural surroundings come alive in each frame is remarkable. The combination of Zvyagintsev and Krichman is a gift for viewers, just as director Grigory Kozintsev paired with Jonas Gritsius to give us those magnificent Shakespeare films from Russia, Korol Lir (King Lear) and Gamlet (Hamlet).

Apart from actors and the cameraman of Zvyagintsev’s cinema, viewers have been introduced to three remarkable musicians Andrei Dergatchev in The Return, the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt in The Banishment, and now in Elena the minimalist US composer Philip Glass. In Elena, Philip Glass’ music comes in stark contrast to a diagetic soundtrack, when Elena heads to the nest of her brood. Philip Glass has never been as breathtaking in cinema as he has been in Elena and Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi.

And that is what makes Zvyaginstev’s cinema a rich total experience—great thought-provoking screenplays, superb visuals, arresting performances, delightful music and a direction that leaves you clamoring for more of such films. 

P.S. Elena ranks as one of the 10 best films of 2011 for the author. Zvyagintsev's The Return and The Banishment  have been reviewed earlier on this blog. The Russian films Silent Souls and Korol Lir (King Lear) and  the US film Michael Clayton have also been reviewed on this blog.

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123. Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s “Jodái-e Náder az Simin” (Nader and Simin: A Separation) (2011): A delightful study of gender differences and the importance of keeping the family together

Iranian cinema has made impressive strides in recent decades and Nader and Simin: A Separation is undoubtedly the crowning achievement of Iranian cinema in 2011. It is not often that any film wins three of the four top honors at a major festival such as the Berlin Film Festival 2011.  Apart from the Golden Bear for the best film,  Nader and Simin: A Separation won the Silver Bears for Best Actor and Best Actress—it only missed out on the Best Director, a redundant award after having won the Golden Bear. The many other awards the film has won include the Silver Peacock for the best director at the Indian International Film Festival held in Goa and the Golden Globe for the best foreign film. No Iranian film has received such an impressive and varied international recognition to date.

There are many reasons to admire this work of cinema. One, it is one of the few Iranian films that has enjoyed equal recognition within Iran and elsewhere. Though the film has slivers of implicit critical commentary on the conditions in Iran today, the mainstay of the film is a social commentary that could take place anywhere in the world. It is probably this fact that led the current government of Iran to allow this film as an official entry of Iran at the Oscars 2012.

The second reason that evokes admiration is that the film is not about a separation leading to divorce, but instead a film on how a wife, Simin, of 14 years desires to be with her husband, Nader, but emigrate from Iran and thus give a fillip to the future of their 11-year-old daughter, Termeh. Another aspect of this social value chain is the bull-headed stand of Nader, who refuses to emigrate because of his ingrained Asian fundamental value of the son's moral responsibility to care for his Alzheimer-stricken father in Iran. Nader’s viewpoint is the derived from the Asian value of parents giving all their efforts and savings for their offspring, quite in contrast to modern western values. The film thus underscores the importance of a family, the love of a mother for her daughter, a son for his father, a daughter for her parents, and an economically weak husband, Hodjat, for his wife Razieh and their daughter.

The third reason that makes the film outstanding is the rapid flow of the realistic narrative, enabled by an ensemble cast that makes the viewer feel the events on screen could easily happen to the viewer as well, in any geographical context. There is not one moment in the film when the viewer would feel bored. The amazing script enraptures the viewer as a thriller would while the film exudes realism that is easily identifiable and credible.

The fourth reason is that the film’s director Asghar Farhadi seems to have made his best work to date, with each film he has made being progressively an improvement on his previous work. This work finally catapults him to a level where he can rub shoulders with finest of Iranian filmmakers: Mehrjui, Kiarostami, Majidi, Panahi, Naderi, the Makhmalbaf family, and Jalili. The success of this film will definitely help to bring into international limelight the finest of Iranian cinema to audiences who are unaware of its stature.

There is no dull moment in this Asghar Farhadi film. The film opens with a court scene, where a magistrate is only heard on screen, not seen (a craft perfected in a superb Iranian 2004 film by director Mohsen Amiryousefi called Bitter Dream). What is not seen is a deliberate effort by the director to hide the less relevant details and focus instead on the more important.  The magistrate asks Simin (played by the beautiful Leila Hatami, who has played roles for Mehrjui and Kiarostami in the past, and is a daughter of another Iranian film director of repute—Ali Hatami) why does she think her daughter has no future in Iran. The question is not answered by Simin but her body language does. This is the first of the only two overtly political comments that this critic spotted in the film. It is not easy to make an honest film in Iran. Asghar Farhadi seems to walk the tight rope with a panache while others get into trouble with the authorities. 

Nader and Simin: A Separation is a tale of half truths and the impact of these half truths on various individuals, on growing children who look upon their parents as role models, and on relationships of teachers in schools with the parents of their students. It is also a tale of conflicts of class and wealth in society. But most of all,  it is not cinema of escapism, but of reality. The film presents a very real modern day Iran—and this critic has visited Iran on five occasions over two decades on official work related to agriculture, interacting with ordinary citizens, scientists, and a succession of powerful Federal Ministers in that field. Iranians are a very intelligent and admirable people, in spite of the current public intolerance of other faiths. The second evidence of political criticism (if it was meant to be one) in this film that I spotted was the Alzheimer-stricken father of Nader wearing a necktie and being driven in a car in public places in Iran. Why Nader did that is not explained in the film. In Iran, only foreigners wear neckties, as other citizens could face the wrath of the moral police that often terrorize the public.

While much of the film delves into the conflict between two couples--one rich, one poor—arising out of the outraged knee-jerk anger of a loving son (on seeing his father left unattended and fallen on the ground with his hands tied to the bed-rail) expressed towards his female house employee who had neglected her responsibility and stepped out of the house, the film surprises the viewer at every stage like a thriller. A major surprise is when the pivotal figure in the film turns out to be the young girl, Termeh, and not her parents, Nader and Simin, as the title of the film would have led the viewer to believe. Farhadi’s film has made a great leap by allowing a young girl to make the major decision in the film that will affect her parents and eventually her like an adult having watched adults and their behavior. It does not matter what the decision is—what matters is who makes the decision, in a world where the males made all the decisions. (Interestingly, the young girl in the movie is played by Farhadi’s real life daughter.) Ironically, the viewers will recall the film had begun with a woman demanding a better deal for her daughter.  Farhadi has made a film that re-defines the role of women in modern Iran (and why not, when the first Nobel Prize winner in Iran was a woman, Shrin Ebadi!) while men only seem to care and give priority to other men over women (at least in in this cinematic tale).  It is a great film that focuses on women and the girl child in Iran.

Farhadi’s film is one that will have universal acceptance because what is shown on screen will appeal to most viewers worldwide. The performances are truly outstanding. The editing is equally commendable. And for Farhadi to have developed the tale from real life observations the effort is commendable. True to the director’s recent trends in exhibiting improved abilities with each film, I hope the next Farhadi film outdoes this film in overall merit. Farhadi seems to have raised his own bar for his next jump.

P.S. Nader and Simin: A Separation ranks as one of the 10 best films of 2011 for the author. Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly was reviewed earlier on this blog. Iranian films by Mehrjui, Kiarostami, Panahi, Naderi, Amiryousefi, Makhmalbaf, and Majidi have been also been reviewed earlier.

P.P.S. When this author queried blogger MKP at The Film Sufi on the curious necktie scene mentioned above, MKP replied "You make an interesting point, Jugu. Since the Revolution, Iranian authorities and moralizers have endeavored to establish a social norm opposed to men wearing a necktie, which is deemed to be too “Western” and not in alignment with the principles of the Revolution. You do occasionally see some people, particularly in places like Tehran, wearing ties, but they are usually older people whose practices date back to the “old days”, when it was more common among the progressive middle classes. Nader’s allowing his father to wear a necktie would presumably reflect his filial loyalty. And it would also probably subtly underscore the class distinction between his family and that of Razieh in "A Separation" - Asghar Farhadi (2011)"

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