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
On
the surface Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s 2009 film About Elly may,
as many reviewers and critics have observed, seem to have relationships with
the great Antonioni film L’Avventura; in this film, also involving a
vacation trip to a seaside location (the Caspian sea, in this case, having
replaced the warmer waters of the Mediterranean) during which suddenly, without
explanation, a young woman suddenly goes missing. If these figures do not
precisely parallel the more wealthy celebrants of the Antonioni film, they
nonetheless do represent a upper-middle class of Teheran life. And, like the
Italians of L’Avventura sexuality is certainly in the air—although in
Farhadi’s film there is no suggestion of any actual sexual encounters; the men
and women sleep in separate rooms, even though all but of two of the would-be partyers
are already married and have children who accompany them on the trip.
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 in 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.
Indeed, at least in the beginning of the
film, they speak so quickly in a Farsi argot that even with an excellent English
translation it is 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.
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.
But soon they discover another, maybe
even more serious problem. Elly is also missing. Had she attempted to save the
child and drowned? Had she simply abandoned the children to return to Teheran?
Why is her bag missing? As Sepidah’s husband Amir (Mani Haghighi) begins to
interrogate her, his wife reveals that she has hidden Elly’s bag, and that, in
fact, Elly was engaged to another man, Alireza, and that she has pressured the
young teacher to join them on their vacation trip nonetheless.
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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