Two years ago Ashgar Farhadi gifted the world with a dazzling movie titled A Separation. Winning every award in sight, it announced the filmmaker to an audience he didn’t previously have, like myself. So when it was announced that the director would have his follow up film The Past at AFI I rushed out to have the opportunity to see the flick. While the movie doesn’t reach the operatic heights of his prior film, The Past is still a solid movie.
The Past is a movie about so much, but I’ll try to summarize it for you here. Ahmad (Ali Mossaffa), an Iranian man, travels back to Paris after four years away to finalize the divorce proceedings with his wife Marie (Berenice Bejo). When he arrives, he find things to be a bit more unstable than he probably expected with the addition of the new relationship Marie has developed with Samir (Tahar Rahim), a Arab man who has a temperamental son Fouad (Elyes Aguis) and a wife who is in a coma. If that wasn’t enough, Marie’s eldest daughter is openly rebelling because of her disdain for the new man in her mother’s life. It is from there that the relationships begin to twist and secrets begin to pour out that threaten the fabric of everyone’s lives.
One thing Farhadi manages to do well in this film is that he plays in the margins of the human experience. Relationship dramas often tread familiar territory, but he manages to put his stamp on the genre with his smart screenplay and deft visual eye. The opening sequence at the airport where neither Ahmad or Marie can hear each other explains so much of what we’ll deal with later in the film. As the movie went on Farhadi found interesting ways to block the action to maximize the words he wrote and the actors performances. I mean the movie gets really messy, in a good way, as the close confines begin to really affect the character and Farhadi stages it for maximum hurt without judging.
The script, while managing to create some engaging plots, becomes a bit too reliant on twists near the end and gets bogged down by its many interesting elements that if feels 15 minutes longer than it is. The messiness that so suits the film early on turns problematic once Samir’s wife and the reasons behind her coma get explored.
Farhadi yet again manages to pull just what he needs from his actors. And what he seems to need is dynamically amazing performances. Berenice Bejo, Oscar nominated for her role in The Artist, is inhabiting a much less glamorous role here and tears into it with relish. Her Marie is a woman trying to have her cake and eat it too, without being overt about it. The more the events weighed on the character the more I began to appreciate just how layered she made Marie. Standing up to her is Ali Mossaffa who does more with silence than most performs do with dialogue. He’s playing the moral compass in the film, despite what one would expect, and manages to be both above the fray and willing to play in the mess. Tahar Rahim is solid as Samir, but I felt that Farhadi should have let him go a bit further with his coiled intensity and lash out a bit more.
The star of this movie however is Pauline Burlet, who plays the reblious daughter Lucie. Being a dead ringer for Marion Cotillard, the young actress manages to conjure up petulance without being annoying and manages to convey a sense of shattered innocence that doesn’t ring untrue. The more she gets involved in the story the better the movie becomes.
All in all, The Past is a solid, if slightly problematic movie that manages to entertain for the full running time.
Grade: ***/**** (B)