A window in Paris: where did Asghar Farhadi's film voyeurism lead
This year's Cannes contestant, the drama "Parallel Stories" by one of the most respected Iranian directors, Asghar Farhadi, is coming to Russian screens. Starring Vincent Cassel, Isabelle Huppert and Pierre Ninet, Catherine Deneuve got a small role, and the plot is based on the sixth episode of The Decalogue by Krzysztof Kieslowski. All this automatically makes "Parallel Stories" an event for connoisseurs of auteur cinema, although not everyone will like the film in the end — and there is a feeling that Farhadi did it on purpose. Izvestia analyzes the provocative statement of the master.
What does the "Decalogue" have to do with it
Among the main TV series of all time, Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Decalogue" is often ranked first in serious ratings. In fact, this is an anthology where each of the ten Mosaic commandments becomes the reason for a modern plot. The series is appreciated for its philosophical scale and, of course, for the deceptively simple stories that Kieslowski tells with incomparable skill.
The sixth novel of the Decalogue played up the commandment "Thou shalt not commit adultery." Her hero was a young man who, from the window of his apartment, looks through a telescope at a woman living opposite and falls in love with her. His imagination complemented what did not fall into his field of vision, but then the hero had to face the real life of the object of his desire. Kieslowski later expanded this plot and released it under the title "A Short Film about Love."
A shot from the TV series "Decalogue"
When it became known that Asghar Farhadi had made a film based on that story, and even with the same music by Zbigniew Preisner, and with the superstars of French cinema, it, of course, caused a lot of excitement. Farhadi is not just a major Iranian director, he is one of the most decorated authors in modern cinema: two Oscars, the Golden Bear, several Cannes awards — except for Jafar Panahi, who was able to achieve more from international awards.
In addition, there have been two high-profile scandals around Farhadi over the past few years. First, his former student sued for plagiarism, believing that the director stole the plot of the film "Hero" (the Grand Prix Jury of Cannes 2021) after watching her documentary. Farhadi won the court, but the fallout remained. Then, in 2024, Farhadi announced that he would no longer make films in Iran until the country allowed women to be shown bareheaded. And so far he keeps his word.
What is the movie "Parallel Stories" about
There is not much left of Kieslowski's plot in Parallel Stories: two houses opposite each other, a telescope, a young man in love and a beautiful woman, whom he enthusiastically watches, igniting his imagination. However, this is only part of the plot, confusing, vague and ephemeral. The exposition is generally stated somewhat differently. The elderly eccentric writer Sylvia (Isabelle Huppert) lives in an apartment littered with books and junk. She writes her books by peeking through a telescope at the neighbors across the street and inventing novels with crime, adultery and other passions based on the observed details.
Sylvie's new book is about the noise studio, the windows of which are located opposite her apartment. There, a woman (Virginie Efira) and two men (Vincent Cassel and Pierre Ninet) sound out films from morning to night, adding the sounds of footsteps, wings or a bed shaking under lovers. So Sylvie came up with the idea that this woman lives with a younger man, but sometimes secretly meets with the older one, and he is married at the same time. And all this leads them to murder. The book is so bad that even Sylvia's regular publisher (Catherine Deneuve cameo) just throws up his hands.
A frame from the movie "Parallel Stories"
At this moment, a young clown Adam (Adam Bessa) appears in Sylvia's life, who recently served time in prison for theft, but the guy seems to be not bad. He helps the writer with cleaning the apartment and preparing it for sale, but a bad novel, a telescope and the beauty of the woman in the next window do their job — Adam blows his mind. Now he wants to become a writer, and get to know that woman, and save her from men. Fiction and reality mix, multiply on top of each other and completely confuse the viewer.
Almost all the influential Western media have published devastating articles about "Parallel stories", mockingly ridiculing the shortcomings of the film. I got both the static heroine Huppert, and the cliched plot moves that make the film as bad-tasting as Sylvia's novel, and the vagueness that made it impossible to isolate the main line.
Asghar Farhadi was accused of torturing a spectator for two and a half hours. And the ratings on all aggregators for the film are low as a result. Everyone was captivated only by Vincent Cassel, who simultaneously plays an overly active husband looking for adventures on the side, and the studio owner, exhausted by various sores, who for some reason has recently become tormented by jealousy of his own brother.
A frame from the movie "Parallel Stories"
But for some reason, few people write that Farhadi is talking about his personal crisis here. "Parallel Stories" is the first picture in five years, and it was not easy for the master, especially after the story of the trial in Iran. Farhadi, who is not an outspoken political opponent of the government, nevertheless voluntarily threw himself out of the national film industry.
Of course, he had previously shot "Secrets of the Past" in France and "Labyrinths of the Past" in Spain, but he seemed to do "Stories" feeling like a bit of a refugee. Perhaps the very Adam who is brought to the center of the narrative. A hero who has broken with his old life and is groping for opportunities for a new one, but in this new life a lot is unclear to him, not what it seemed. As for Adam, meeting a beautiful woman turns a lot upside down.
The key to the narrative is the profession of the subjects of observation, Sylvia and Adam. It seems to us that in the movies we hear what we see, but all these are not real sounds, they imitate life, but they have a different origin, they are artificial and therefore insidious. Farhadi shows the process of dubbing films here with such obsession that at times it seems that this is the only metaphor he really needed, and everything else, including the superstars of France, is made up in the same way as Sylvia's novels, which she slowly taps on an ancient typewriter.
A frame from the movie "Parallel Stories"
Everything is an imitation, everything is a fantasy, a mirage, a delusion, and maybe it's better to leave it that way, Farhadi tells us. Another question is whether it was really necessary to spend one hundred and forty minutes for this thought.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
