nobody knows anything
by
Douglas Messerli
Asghar
Farhadi (writer and director) Todos lo saben (Everybody Knows) /
2018, USA 2019
Iranian
filmmaker Asghar Farhadi’s most recent film, Everybody Knows, begins a
bit like Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, with so many family members and
guests arriving simultaneously at a location that it is nearly impossible for
the viewer to sort them out. In fact, in both cases, that is the purposeful
effect. Like unknowing guests we arrive on the scene in which everyone else
seems to know “everything,” and we are blinded almost through the first third
of this beautifully-filmed work by our imperceptions. Perhaps that initial
sense of confusion caused critics at the Cannes Film Festival and upon the
American release in 2019, to keep their distance from this Farhadi masterwork,
or perhaps it was simply fact that the arthouse director, in this case, was
working in a language not his own, within a far popular genre, a thriller-mystery.
The reviews seemed generally polite, but
to my way of thinking, did not do justice to this complexly stimulating work.
Those early scenes are obviously
overwhelming. Who are all these people? And why are they gathering with their
wives, husbands, and children in this small Madrid suburban town? We soon
recognize that Laura (Penélope Cruz) has traveled the furthest, without her
husband, but with her two children, Irene (Carla Campra), and the younger son
Diego (Iván Chavero), from Argentina, evidentially the for one of the first
times since she left the small community with her husband Alejandro (Ricardo
Darín).
We soon recognize Laura’s sisters
Mariana (Elvira Mínguez)—who reveals that she and her husband are in the
process of divorce—and her younger sister, Ana (Inma Cuesta) who is about to
marry Joan (Roger Casamajor). And we are just a quickly introduced to the
father of this clan, the widowed and stubbornly independent-minded Antonio (Ramón
Barea), so advanced in age that we might almost imagine this could become a
kind comic work about dying. Altman might have turned it into that.
It’s not. At least not literally. The
family is, in fact, not the real focus of this work, although they certainly
capture the majority of the frames early on. For the real relationships
in this work exist not in the present, with the marriage of Ana and Joan, but
in the past and in the future, the last of which quickly slaps this film into
motion as the carefree teenager Irene suddenly encounters a young local boy, Felipe
(Sergio Castellanos), with who, almost as suddenly as they arrive, she goes on
a wild motorcycle ride through country roads, she at the helm. We almost
perceive immediately that the film is truly about her and fears for the dangers
which she may encounter.
I read a recent article about how trees
interconnect with one another through their roots: and this is a literal
rendering of that. These individuals all know each other far too well, and far
better than any outsider might ever be able to. We, the audience, are simply
the visitors to the wedding and its after-events, far too slow to comprehend
the love, bitterness, and hate that the village itself has nourished. As Paco
tells his workers very early in the film, you have to keep the newly picked
grapes away from the others if you intend to create a great wine.
But we know, even as outsiders, that the
problem is that in such a community the past can never separated from the
present. When Laura’s daughter Irene suddenly goes missing, the kidnapper(s)
leave a terrible message in the form of newspaper clippings from another past
kidnapping, in which evidently the young girl had been killed. The kidnappers
reassure her that if she goes to the police, Irene too will be murdered.
By now, of course, we have entered the
domain of Alfred Hitchcock, and the desperation of family members, all of whom
have their own theories, reaches to the heights of The Man Who Knew Too Much—except
in this film everybody knows too much, or, at least, think they do. For
a more reasoned logic, Laura must turn to her youthful lover, Paco, who advises
her to pretend that she is attempting to raise the money the kidnappers
demand—despite the fact, she is forced to admit, despite the village
perceptions, her husband and she have no money, he having been unemployed for
the past two years?
Like an onion being pealed, bit by bit,
we discover what even we’re not sure are truths. Is Irene actually Paco’s
child, as Laura ultimately claims. Did she sell the estate which Paco has
turned into a profitable enterprise at an enormous loss, simply to escape the
town or the need to run on with her current lover? And why are the kidnappers
now sending messages to Paco’s wife, Bea (Bárbara Lennie) as well?
When she finally summons her husband, Alejandro,
to return, he too seems almost like a suspect, although an unwitting and rather
naïve version of such a figure.
Although “everybody knows everything” in
this community no one seems to know anything really. Was it someone close to
the family, a group of angry workers from Paco’s fields, even Paco
himself—particularly if he knew of the paternity of Irene? These are the
questions the film keeps demanding that we consider.
Perhaps simply out of guilt or playing
bluff, Paco offers his estate for sale, never imagining, one must presume, that
such a sale would have to take place in order to bring back Irene.
The truth, in this world, is almost too difficult to reveal, and, as
Farhadi himself has suggested, the real truths, despite what we finally hear,
exist out of the film’s frame. Did Laura herself arrange for the kidnapping in
order to punish her childhood lover, to find money in order to survive with her
current husband? You need to see the movie and make your own conclusions. Yet
however you might interpret it, there are no longer any easy answers.
Nobody knows truly what made these
figures act the way they did. Perhaps not even them. The film ends with Laura
gently unwrapping Irene’s legs and bringing her back into family love. We can
only suspect that, in fact, she has introduced her into another generation of
secrets of love and hate.
Los
Angeles, July 21, 2019
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (July 2019).
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