Christopher Nolan

Films of Christopher Nolan:

• Memento - Christopher Nolan (2000)
• The Dark Knight - Christopher Nolan (2008)
• Inception - Christopher Nolan (2010)
• Interstellar - Christopher Nolan (2014) 

"Where Is the Friend's Home?" - Abbas Kiarostami (1987)

Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami began writing and directing films, both features and documentaries, in the 1970s, but it wasn’t until his seventh feature, Where Is The Friend’s Home (Khane-ye Doust Kodjast?, 1987) that he established his reputation outside of Iran.  Like many modestly budgeted Iranian films of those days, including Kiarostami’s earlier works, this film is a child’s story, presumably for the reason that such subjects are less likely to involve social restrictions than would stories about more mature men and women. 

Since then Kiarostami’s reputation soared, and he has gone on to receive considerable international acclaim for a string of uniquely stylized successes, including Close-Up (Nema-ye Nazdik, 1990), Through the Olive Trees (Zire Darakhatan Zeyton, 1994), Taste of Cherry (Ta'am-e-Gilās, 1997 and winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival), The Wind Will Carry Us (Bād Mā-rā Khāhad Bord, 1999), and 10 (Ten, 2002).  All these films have been characterized by his signature self-reflexive and long-take cinematography, along with overt invocations of Iranian poetry and mystical philosophy – the summation of which give his films a distinctly intellectual air and which has drawn the admiration of intellectual critics the world over. Indeed, in the fashion of many well-educated Iranians, Kiarostami has multiple cultural inclinations that include poetry composition, painting, and graphical design, and these interests are reflected in those later works.  In contrast with those subsequent films, the present film under examination, Where Is My Friend’s Home?, is a more modest and straightforward movie.  Nevertheless, I think it is Kiarostami’s most entertainingly satisfying cinematic experience for the viewer.

In some ways one might compare Kiarostami to Luis Bunuel.  Both of them were obliged to work in conventional commercial formats (in Bunuel’s case, as an expatriate in Mexico), and then both subsequently received accolades that gave them the latitude to try more intellectually adventuresome and personally expressive works.  And yet, for both, those early constraining production circumstances may have somehow contributed to their producing their best work.  In the case of Where Is the Friend’s Home?, what we have is a deceptively simple little story that seems trivial: an eight-year-old schoolboy has mistakenly taken his friend’s schoolbook and has to return it to him.  But this film benefits from not straying far from its straightforward goal that everyone can understand; and that is what carries the narrative along.  As the film progresses, though, we gradually detect a deeper theme: this boy’s sense of “doing the right thing” is almost continually in conflict with the confusing world of rules and duties that are imposed on him by the adult world.

The film narrative proceeds in five parts.

1.  The problem

In the small northern village of Koker (Kiarostami would later situate some other films in this village), Ahmed Ahmadpoor and Mohamad Reza Nematzadeh are two boys sitting in the local schoolroom (not surprisingly, boys only) and listening to the stern admonitions of their strict schoolteacher.  Mohamad Reza again hasn’t written his homework into his school workbook and is warned that one more such violation and he will be expelled from the school.  When the school bell rings and the boys run outside, Mohamad Reza drops his workbook, and in the ensuing commotion, Ahmed mistakenly goes home with both his and his friend’s workbook.

At home Ahmed’s mother, busy with housework, continually gives her boy menial jobs and refuses to let him go outside and return Mohamad Reza’s schoolbook.  Among the chores, though, is to go fetch some bread from the local bakery, and Ahmed seizes this opportunity to rush outside with the schoolbook in search of his friend’s home, whose location he only knows to be in the neighbouring village of Poshteh.

2.  1st trip to Poshteh

Poshteh seems to be a couple of kilometres away from Koker, and Ahmed runs all the way there to look for his friend’s house.  As Ahmed runs across the countryside, the viewer gets a feeling for the pastoral life in this locale.  Once in Poshteh, Ahmed asks around, and we see that the adults have little time to pay attention to the questions of an 8-year-old boy.  But by luck Ahmed happens onto a classmate who lives there but who only knows where Mohamad Reza’s cousin Hemmati lives.  When Ahmed finally finds that house, though, he learns that Hemmati has just gone off to Koker.  So now Ahmed has to run all the way back to Koker.

3.  Return to Koker

As he runs past a storefront in Koker, Ahmed passes by his grandfather, who sternly questions why the boy has gone outside the village. Afterwards, when Ahmed is out of earshot, the grandfather tells an elderly friend that all young people need to be continually disciplined in order to grow up properly.  In fact, he says, it is generally good for a boy to be beaten every two weeks, come what may, whether he has misbehaved or not.

A tradesman shows up at the storefront, and during a bit of rural local color as the man tries to hawk his iron doors, Ahmed overhears the surname Nematzadeh mentioned and tries to speak to the man.  But here, as elsewhere, the adults pay no attention to the boy other than to give orders and recommend punishments.  The tradesman brusquely gets on his donkey and heads off to Poshteh, with Ahmed, thinking that he may have found Mohamad Reza’s father, in hot pursuit.

4.  2nd trip to Poshteh

Back in Poshteh, Ahmed finally finds the tradesman’s son, but it is not Mohamad Reza.  By this time it has become dusk, but Ahmed does manage finally to find a man who will talk to him and who promises to show him his friend’s house.  But it turns out that this is an old man who just seems to be looking for anyone to listen to his tales about the virtues of his former craft, making traditional wooden doors, which, he complains, are now everywhere being foolishly replaced by the more “modern” iron doors, even though the traditional wooden doors (a symbol for the traditional Iranian ways that are being replaced by imported modernity) are more beautifully crafted.  Although this old man is friendly, Ahmed begins to suspect that the man just wants a listener and doesn’t really know where his friend lives.  He finally discontinues his quest and runs all the way back to Koker in the dark.

5.  Back in Koker again

Back at home, Ahmed’s parents are occupied with their own routines and again pay no attention to him, and he still hasn’t done his own homework or managed to do the right thing by his friend Mohamad Reza.  But a schoolboy who has spent the whole day trying to solve a problem is not just going to give up just like that.  You can see the film, yourself, to find out how things turn out the next day in school.

Kiarostami’s cinematography is straightforward and intuitive in the film.  The focalization is almost entirely that of the boy, Ahmed, and we see everything from his anxious perspective, where things that may seem trivial for adults can have considerable magnitude.  To maintain this sense of immediate involvement, Kiarostami doesn’t employ the long, fixed-camera takes that characterize his later films.   Here instead,  the visual continuity is well motivated, and even the many shots of Ahmed running across the countryside are smoothly and naturally executed.

There are some interesting moral issues in Where Is The Friend’s Home?.  Ahmed is always utterly sincere and instinctively honest towards everyone.  But sometimes there are higher principles than literal honesty. His ultimate goal is one of compassion: to help his friend, Mohamad Reza, and this is manifested in Part 1 when he helps his friend after he has fallen down and dropped his schoolbook.  In so doing, though, he accidentally walked away with his friend’s schoolbook, and now his primary goal is to return the book.  This is not just to expunge his own guilt, but represents a continuation of his sincere concern for his friend’s vulnerability of expulsion from school.  Adherence to this higher goal trumps more mundane rules that one follows.  So although he is instinctively honest, Ahmed, in pursuit of the higher good, does hesitantly make compromises with literal truth at several turns.  In Part 1 he is supposed to get bread and pretends to do so, but instead rushes off to Poshteh with his friend’s schoolbook.  Later in part 4 he effectively lies to the old man by implying that he has found his friend’s house and returned the book.  And there is still one further lie to come.
★★★

"Fallen Angels" - Wong Kar Wai (1995)

Of all the Wong Kar Wai films, this is my favorite: Fallen Angels (1995).  This film is a further exploration of the unique, lush, inscrutable, yet intuitively sensuous, cinematic aesthetic of Wong Kar Wai (Wáng Jia-wèi). To some extent, in fact, this film represents a further step in Wong’s aesthetic progression that was in evidence in his earlier films, As Tears Go By (1988), Days of Being Wild (1990), and Chungking Express (1993). 

Again we are witness not so much to an outward, external narrative that depicts a progression of significant events, but to an internal narrative of subjective yearning for love.  Throughout Wong’s films one senses that his characters are cut off from real, meaningful engagement with others.  Much of the time we witness the non-events of missed opportunities and lost connections, as his principal characters try to come to the grips with their endless search for an authentic and satisfying connection with another person.  The lives of Wong’s people are primarily taking place in their own dreamworlds, which are sometimes radically mismatched with and disconnected from reality.  Wong, the Master of the Broken Heart, highlights this sense of frustrated isolation with several memorable scenes of sexual self-gratification.  In addition, the moody ambience of loneliness is ironically accentuated by the crowded environs and atmosphere of Hong Kong, a cramped and intensely claustrophobic urban jungle.  Wong achieves this pervasive sense of existential longing by means of his expressionistic visual and temporal stylistics that make his films less like traditional stories and more like extended riffs of beat poetry.  

Fallen Angels (Duo Luo Tian Shi) is closely connected with its predecessor, Chungking Express, since the themes in this film were originally planned to be additional parts of the multithreaded Chungking Express but were ultimately cut out from that story.  The setting here is still in the colourful Chungking Mansions locale of Hong Kong, and there are somewhat jocular allusions, or perhaps homages, to the earlier film at various points.  For example, Tekeshi Kaneshiro, plays lovelorn principal characters in both films, and his Fallen Angels character has some explicit connections with his Chungking Express character. In the earlier film he was cop #223, while in Fallen Angels he is (an escaped) prisoner #223.  Moreover, his earlier character honored his former girlfriend by eating daily doses of her favorite food, pineapple; while in this film we are told that it was his childhood consumption of a tainted dose of pineapple that made him permanently mute.

Like Chungking Express, Fallen Angels has two narrative threads that are only loosely and occasionally connected with each other.  While Chungking Express expressed its two threads serially, Fallen Angels, interleaves their presentation, as we switch back and forth between the two.  This switching back and forth perhaps creates the unfulfilled expectation that their parallel actions are more closely connected than they turn out to be, but never mind – the connection is more associated with the internal, psychic canvass than with what is going on in the external world.

The first narrative thread involves three principal characters:

• Wong Chi-Ming (played by Leon Lai) – a cold-blooded and alienated contract killer for the Hong Kong gangster community.  He can get into an amiable conversation on a bus with an old schoolmate just after having killed a roomful of people.
• The Agent (Michelle Reis) – a gorgeous gangster “manager” who makes specific arrangements for the killings.  She and Wong are strictly business partners, but she secretly yearns for an amorous involvement with Wong.
• Blondie (Karen Mok) – a pretty and vivacious punky girl with died hair who falls in love with Wong.

The second narrative also features three main characters:

• He Zhiwu (Tekeshi Kaneshiro) – a mute eccentric who has escaped from some institution (perhaps a mental institution) in which he had been confined.  He makes his living by breaking into shops after they have closed for the night and making passers-by pay him money in order not to be his customers.
• He’s father (Chen Wanlei) – he is an assistant manager of the Chungking Mansions hotel.
• Cherry (Charlie Young) – a beautiful girl that He Zhiwu occasionally meets on the streets and with whom he falls in love.

Although throughout the film there are various spectacular and bloody gangland shootouts, as well as laughably absurd nocturnal street encounters involving He Zhiwu, this film is really about the disappointments of the sought-after love affairs involving the main characters.  Like its counterpart, Chungking Express, the narrative presentation follows the inner monologue voiceovers of the two principal main characters, Wong and He Zhiwu (although he is mute, we still hear his voice in voiceover).  But there is a distinct difference in perspective.  While in Chungking Express we followed the internal sufferings of the two principal males who had been dumped by their girlfriends, here the ones who suffer unrequited love are primarily the women.   But we see these suffering women from the outside – basically from the man’s perspective, not from an internal perspective.  There are some inner voiceovers from two of the female characters, but they are brief and don’t seem to represent their authentic feelings.  Instead those few voiceover moments seem to be showing the girls trying to cover their feelings, both to the unseen witness and to themselves, in an effort to save face.  And the two male perspectives here are extreme opposites.  Wong is alienated from human feelings and avoids meaningful relationships.  Perhaps partly on account of this attitude, the women he meets are strongly attracted to him.  He Zhiwu, Wong’s opposite, desperately wants to make human contact, but be cannot express himself and noone wants him around.

The two stories of Fallen Angels go through four phases.

1.  Establishing the base relationships

• 1st thread.  Wong lives in a tiny, cramped apartment next to the subway, which is cleaned every day by his “agent”, who has been his business partner for three years.  She “cases” the intended hit scenes and then faxes a drawing to Wong so that he can know how to attack and plan his escape routes.  The agent lives in the hotel managed by He Zhiwu’s father.

• 2nd thread.  He Zhiwu, escaped prisoner #223, hides in the gangster agent’s apartment while fleeing the cops.  He spends his time at night hassling people to pay him money so that he will stop annoying them.  This segment also establishes the one meaningful relationship that He Zhiwu has, that with his father.

2.  New relationships

• 1st thread.  Wong meets Blondie at a McDonald’s.  Like Yuddy in Days of Being Wild, Wong is self-obsessed and likes to admire himself in the mirror.  Meanwhile Wong’s agent seethes with lust for Wong back in her own apartment.

• 2nd thread.  He Zhiwu meets and befriends Cherry, whose boyfriend has just dumped her for another “Blondie”.  He Zhiwu helps Cherry look around for her old boyfriend and in the process falls in love with her.

3.  Lost Opportunities

• 1st thread.  Blondie anguishes over the ephemerality of her one-night stand with Wong, who says good-bye to her and then proceeds to dissolve his business relationship with his manager – an act that has disastrous consequences. 

• 2nd thread.  He Zhiwu loses track of Cherry, but later discovers that she has become an airline stewardess (another homage to Chungking Express), has a new boyfriend, and has forgotten even what the heartbroken He looks like.

4.  Finale 

There is a final merger of the two threads, when Wong’s agent happens onto He Zhiwu during one of her gangster operations.

What makes this film so appealing?  As usual with Wong, the expressionistic cinematography of Chris Doyle plays a big part.  There is incessant use of wide-angle camera shots that bizarrely distort and enhance the sense of separation on the part of the perceiver.  This is sometimes alternated with long-lens shots, in the fashion of Antonioni, where the depth of field is so short that only the subject of interest is in focus and the background is entirely blurred.   There are relentless moving camera shots, sometimes closely tracking faces as people walk through a scene.  The occasional shifts to black-and-white color renderings accentuate a lovesick character’s bleak feelings of unfeeling dismissal by his or her beloved.  Additionally, there are odd glances, like memory fragments, that momentarily focus on a piece of clothing, a curve of a leg, a torso – all memorabilia that persist in the mind.  

It has the same nocturnal, brooding flavor as Chungking Express, only perhaps a little better.  This may be due to the magnetic performances of the three women, particularly Karen Mok, who energize the screen with emotion.  Although everyone in Hong Kong, it seems, is trying to mask his or her true feelings, the women are inevitably more emotional and compelling than the more stoical men.  It’s all a dream, and yet this is the real world in which most of us live.  It is the realm of consciousness – longing after moments and fragments that suddenly appear out of nowhere, and which in retrospect were thrilling, but which then quickly disappear and are lost forever.  Particularly memorable are the haunting shots of He Zhiwu riding on his motorcycle through a dark tunnel that seems to lead straight into the unknown darkness of the future.  Fallen Angels ends on one of those shots.
★★★★

"This Is Not a Film" - Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb (2011)

Ordinarily I ignore a film’s production backstory, since being mindful of those details undermines my immersion in the diegetic world, and hence the story the filmmaker wants to tell.  But with This Is Not a Film (In Film Nist, 2011) I make an emphatic exception.  In this case the production backstory is essential to the film’s subject – freedom of expression in the face of a despotic regime.

The background story concerns the distinguished Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s arrest and confinement by the Iranian authorities following the widely disputed 2009 Iranian presidential “election”.  Panahi, who had supported the defeated Green Movement candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, was arrested shortly afterwards when he attended a cemetery gathering to mourn the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, who had been gunned down on the streets during post-election protests.   Although Panahi was later released from prison, he was banned from leaving the country and was rearrested in March 2010.  Then on 20 December 2010, Panahi was convicted on the charge of plotting to “commit crimes against the country’s national security” and was sentenced to six years in prison and banned for 20 years from “making or directing any movies, writing screenplays, giving any form of interview with Iranian or foreign media as well as leaving the country” [1].  The movie This Is Not a Film was made in March 2011 when Panahi was under house arrest awaiting the results of his legal appeal of this conviction. 

Actually it is amazing that Panahi managed to have a film made at all under these restrictive circumstances.  Here he is, a man arrested and confined in order to stifle his voice and forbidden to engage in any kind of film activity, shown on camera talking about his situation.  This work (not labelled a “film”, of course, but merely an “effort”) is the collaboration of Panahi and documentary filmmaker Mojtaba Mirtahmasb.  It was shot during the Nouruz (Iranian New Year) period with the events shown covering Chaharshanbe Souri, the Iranian equivalent of New Year’s Eve.  How they managed to smuggle the finished film out of the country must have been a story in itself, because it was apparently coded onto a flash drive that was concealed inside a birthday cake and was eventually screened at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

This Is Not a Film opens with Panahi shown attending to routine activities inside his apartment.  The focus seems to be on the uneventful tempo of isolated life in the apartment, while outside is heard the sound of explosions, to which Panahi pays no evident attention.  Given the relatively boring nature of Panahi’s activities, the viewer’s attention is naturally drawn to what may be happening outside.  If the noises are a manifestation of some civil disturbance, why is Panahi so unmindful of it?  It soon becomes evident that this day is Chaharshanbe Souri (“Fireworks Wednesday”), because it takes place on the Wednesday before Nouruz, the Iranian New Year’s day.  Chaharshanbe Souri is somewhat like July 4th in the US or like Guy Fawke’s Day in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand: people like to celebrate it with raucous noise and firecrackers.  Actually this day is of far more ancient vintage than its Western counterparts – it is perhaps 4,000 years old, and representative, as is Nouruz itself, of pure Persian culture.  On Chaharshanbe Souri in addition to setting fireworks, people like to make bonfires and leap over them, an act that has some symbolic significance.   It’s also a day that can be seen to represent a certain freedom from routine constraints, even rowdyism, as people engage in celebratory antics on the street.  Not surprisingly, the conservative religious authorities of Iranian society condemn the day and its activities as un-Islamic, but they have so far not been able to suppress its observance.
                           
Relatively early on in This Is Not a Film, Panahi does something that both he (see for example  The Mirror, 1997) and his sometimes collaborator Abbas Kiarostami have done before –  he breaks the “fourth wall” of the film’s “dramatic stage” and begins to talk straight into the camera about the filmmaking going on.  By doing this he actively engages the audience in his concern of how one goes about expressing one’s thoughts in film form.  At first in this film, the shots of Panahi had been photographed by a statically placed camera, but soon his collaborator on this occasion, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, arrives and begins filming Panahi himself.  The subsequent dialogue is then understood to be between Panahi and Mirtahmasb, but we viewers, as silent witnesses, are presumed to be part of the conversation, too.

Panahi now speaks of a film script that he had prepared and for which he had been attempting to get permission to film.  It is based on Chekov’s short story, “From the Diary of a Young Girl” [2]. With the possibility of that filming now closed off, however, Panahi here decides to discuss how that film would have looked in terms of layout and narrative structure.  The proposed script concerns a young woman from a conservative family who wishes to attend college.  Her father in the story forbids her to do that and has her locked up inside the house.  So the film script concerns a girl facing the same kind of suppression that Panahi now faces.  As he describes his plans for this story to Mirtahmasb, we get some interesting insights into various aspects of Panahi’s filmmaking approach.

One of the most interesting, to me, revelations, concerns Panahi’s modest remarks to the effect that he doesn’t know much about the technical details of cinematography.  Filmmakers around the world have varying degrees of expertise at this level, with some being expert camera operators and others leaving the camera work to professional technicians.  For example on this score, I also found it surprising to hear some time ago the accomplished Italian filmmaker Ermanno Olmi remark that the great Federico Fellini never ever looked through a camera lens.  Nevertheless, given the technical cinematic mastery of Panahi’s previous films and the fact that he has been a film editor in connection with some works directed by others, I would have expected him, in particular, to be highly knowledgeable about film cinematography.

Another interesting stylistic point is the way Panahi schematically maps out his proposed camera setup layout with masking tape on his livingroom rug.  Some filmmakers like to do this kind of thing – a sort of overhead-map style layout of where the camera positions should be – while others envision their films in terms of just what will be seen in the film frame.  These two perspectives, which we may refer to as the “architectural” and the “subjective”, are quite different.  The architectural camera map layout perspective is objectivist, a top-down approach that has an implicit view-from-the-sky attitude that keeps all aspects of the scene in consideration.  The film-frame perspective is local and subjective; it is the perspective of a single observer.  Of course both perspectives are useful in filmmaking, and Panahi does refer to the subjective perspective, too, on various occasions in the film; but it is still a question as to which perspective is preferred by the director. It is my understanding that Michelangelo Antonioni, a visual movement master of both the camera and his players, also preferred to think of the scene from the “architectural” perspective.

Also like Antonioni, Panahi says that he generally constructs his film in response to the environmental context of the story: the setting helps determine the narrative structure.  In fact he usually doesn’t map everything out beforehand, because he wants the film to be partially constructed at the time of the shooting – certain unexpected aspects of the visual narrative may emerge during the filmmaking process. He illustrates this filmmaking aspect by showing clips from two of his earlier works, The Mirror (Ayneh, 1997) and Crimson Gold (Talaye Sorkh, 2003), which featured unexpected responses on the part of his unprofessional actors that were incorporated into and added to the narratives.  In fact such an emergent event apparently occurs in This Is Not a Film, too, towards the end, when a student moonlighting as a trash collector shows up at Panahi’s door and Panahi then goes on to converse with him in the elevator.  

Panahi’s desire to capture emergent events and incorporate them into his films reflects an emphasis on spontaneity and authenticity.  This underlies his remark that he has always shot his films outdoors because of the Iranian government’s restrictions on women’s dress in films.  Presumably he finds it artificial and unrealistic to show women invariably wearing the hejab in indoor scenes, so he restricts his action to the outdoors.  Like all Iranian filmmakers working inside the country, though, Panahi’s films do not make overt political statements, and there are no villains.  They simply show people trying to cope with the social circumstances in which they find themselves.

Returning to the events of This Is Not a Film, after Panahi discusses the outline of his proposed film for awhile, he loses interest in further discussions of it.  After all, he says, “if we could tell a film, why make a film”.  Compare this to Alfred Hitchcock, who famously remarked that the thrill of making a film was in its planning.  The actual shooting of the film, for Hitchcock, was merely a boring implementation of the film idea and not a creative activity.

The film events in This Is Not a Film finally move to Mirtahmasb making his departure for the evening to attend to his own family’s Nouruz celebration.  But just when  Mirtahmasb is leaving, the young trash collector unexpectedly shows up; and Panahi decides to accompany him as he makes his rounds collecting trash from the various floors in the apartment building.  The young man cautiously, but genuinely, talks about his life, his difficulties finding a job, and other aspects about his life in Tehran.  When the elevator gets to the bottom, where the trash is deposited in larger containers, Panahi’s camera looks out on the wide world that is beyond the apartment gates and is full of joyous fireworks.  On this view the film closes.

Given the constraints in which Panahi had to work, this film is a fascinating and a valuable testament.  I am not aware of Panahi ever having overtly expressed any hostility to the Iranian government, but he has been muzzled and imprisoned.  Iran now has serious issues concerning:

•  basic human rights, such as free expression
•  the rule of law
•  open democracy. 

Besides the film’s backstory, there have been further, ongoing events.  Iran’s Council of Public Culture has declared The Iranian House of Cinema, Iran’s largest professional organization for filmmakers, to be illegal [3].  Mojtaba Mirtahmasb was arrested in September 2011 as he was leaving the country.  In December 2011, Mirtahmasb was released, but in that same month Panahi’s legal appeal of his prison sentence was denied.
★★★★

Notes:

1. "Filmmaker Jafar Panahi Sentenced to Six Years in Prison", The Green Voice of Freedom,  20/12/2010, http://en.irangreenvoice.com/article/2010/dec/20/2581.
2. This is a one-page story, and you may be able to find a copy of it here.
3. Iran Daily Brief, December 29, 2011, http://www.irandailybrief.com/?p=5695

"About Elly" - Asghar Farhadi (2009)

When middle-class Iranians in Tehran have a holiday, they often like to escape their dry urban confines and trek up north to the Caspian seaside, where everything is cooler and greener. It’s also an opportunity for people to be a little more casual and relaxed in the open air. About Elly (Darbareye Elly, 2009) is a deceptively clever film about one such holiday visit, where events don’t go exactly as planned.  Over the course of the three-day weekend by the sea, the viewer is exposed to the fascinatingly complex social dynamics of people under stress.  In particular, this film has things to say about some of the nuances of Iranian culture under these circumstances (but, of course, much of what happens relates generally to how all of us interact with others).

The film was written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, whose subsequent production was the more famous and highly praised A Separation (2011), which won the US Oscar for Best Foreign Film.  Without diminishing the excellence of A Separation, however, I would say that About Elly is even better and is Farhadi’s best work so far.

The principal characters are a group of holiday travelers who are linked by old friendships formed years before at law school: 

• Amir and Sepideh are a married couple whose daughter, Moravid, is in kindergarten.
• Peyman and Shohreh are a second couple with a little boy and girl, Arash and Anita.
• Manouchehr and Naazy are a third couple.
• Ahmad, also an old friend in addition to being Naazy’s brother, has returned to visit Iran from Germany, where he recently went through a divorce.
• Elly is Moravid’s kindergarten teacher and has been invited along on the trip.

Sepideh is the vivacious social organizer and energizer of the group.  Without her, as she herself points out early on, the entire Caspian trip wouldn’t have happened.  One of her principal goals for the trip is to match up the now-available Ahmad with the pretty and modestly charming Elly, in the hopes that  romantic developments will ensue.  This match-making quickly becomes an open secret among the entourage, and whenever Elly is out of earshot, they all teasingly encourage Ahmad to make his move.

When they all arrive at the seaside villa, they are informed by the local caretaker that the villa they want is only available for one night and that there are probably no other nearby accommodations during this busy three-day holiday period.  It turns out that Sepideh had known beforehand that only one night was available, but she had not told the others about it, figuring that once they got up to the seaside they could find further accommodation for the other two days. She explains to them her reasoning: if she had told them all beforehand about the villa being available for only one night, she couldn’t have convinced them to set out on the trip in the first place.  In her mind, a little deception was needed to make things happen.  

Sepideh then pleads with the local caretaker woman in private that they really need a nice place, because Elly and Ahmad are on their honeymoon.  This little white lie moves the woman to make an extra effort to accommodate the group, and she arranges for an abandoned villa by the sea to be opened up to them.  But note that Sepideh’s little fibs are not just incidental to the story; indeed they constitute one of the major themes of About Elly – how do we convey the truth to others?  

In this connection I would offer the comment that whenever we are in any group, there is a shared understanding concerning issues of mutual concern.  We point to people and things in the world in front of us and discuss them, hoping that we understand each other, even though we know that we all have our own individual interpretations about these things.  Sometimes, in order to spur cooperative group activity in a certain direction, though, we may exaggerate or even innocently bend the literal truth about something.  This of course can be dangerous.  

The difficulty of conveying exactly what we mean is symbolized early on in the film when the holiday makers have fun playing the game of charades (pantomime game).  In that game the goal is to arrive at a shared meaning; but later on in the story words will be used to mislead – to try to generate separated, distinguished understandings of what has happened.

Anyway, returning to the film story, as the viewer watches the evolving socializing of the various people, he or she is likely to assume that the principal narrative line will be about the emerging relationship of Ahmad and Elly.  But on the second day of their outing (about thirty-five minutes into the film) the story takes a disruptive dramatic turn.  The three little children are playing by the beach, and Elly is asked to watch them while the other adults attend to their various activities and chores.  The viewer doesn’t see exactly what happens in this situation with Elly and the children, but it soon emerges that Arash has wandered out into the sea and is lost, and Elly is not around. There is now a desperate effort by find Arash in the sea and save him from drowning.  The panic-stricken group do just manage to rescue and revive the nearly-drowned Arash, but then the attention of the group turns to Elly.  Where is she?

The rest of the story is concerned with finding out where Elly is and what has happened to her. There are two conjectures. She may have drowned attempting to rescue Arash.  Or she may have abruptly left the group and gone back to Tehran without telling anyone. What makes the second conjecture plausible is that it is known by several group members that Elly had only wanted to stay one night at the seaside villa and then return to her infirm mother back home.  In addition, they wonder if the demure Elly had been offended by the boisterous teasing that had been the social undertone of the interactions on the trip.

Now the finger-pointing begins.  With Elly missing, a police investigation ensues to find out the truth of what happened to her.  What had begun in the film as an exercise in social bonding and harmonizing now dissolves into finding blame and searching for excuses to maintain individual innocence.  As they attempt to discover the truth about Elly, the group uncovers the many little lies that had been accumulating during their time together.  The lies were all understandable within their specific social contexts, but now they are exposed as violations of the truth.

Then the story takes another turn when a phone call to Elly’s home in Tehran uncovers the fact that Elly had a fiancé and that upon hearing news of Elly’s disappearance, the fiancé is now rushing to the Caspian area to investigate.  This discovery adds a further layer of guilt, because the group may now appear to have some moral taint in connection with having arranged an apparent romantic tryst between Ahmad and Elly.  Now the new issue becomes who among the group knew that Elly had a fiancé.  To protect themselves, it seems to some of them that further falsehoods may be necessary.

These three phases of the film thus reflect the shifting social dynamics among the group. 

1. In the first phase of the film, before Elly’s disappearance, the socializing was oriented around finding ways to bond and achieve social harmony.  This involves some minor falsehoods, but the goal was to achieve social unity.
2. The second phase covers the period after Elly’s disappearance and before the appearance of the fiancé.  Here the social dynamics are all involved with selfish concerns.  How can each of them establish his or her own innocence and separation from the group?
3. The third phase, after the arrival of the fiancé, sees the group members reluctantly working together again, this time to arrive at an agreed-upon story to tell the fiancé.

So the story moves from group-thinking –> selfish-thinking –> group thinking as it evolves through the three phases.  As the story progresses, all of the characters, including Elly and her fiancé, participate in deception in one form or another.  Most of these falsehoods, particularly those of Sepideh, were uttered in support of group harmony, not just for selfish reasons.  In fact the biggest liars in the story, Sepideh, Ahmad, Manouchehr, and Naazy, are the most selfless and compassionate.  They exude innocence.  The three characters most closely adhering to the literal truth, Amir, Shohreh, and Peyman, are in fact the most selfish people in the story.

This is what makes About Elly a fascinating tale.  We generally make knee-jerk affirmations about the importance of telling the truth and not lying.  But the story about truth is often more complicated in social situations.   When should one really utter the unvarnished truth?  That is a question that goes back at least as far as Plato’s Dialogues. Indeed the title, “About Elly”, is ironic, since the film is really “About Self” and how the selfish individual relates to a group.  The people in this story are mostly concerned with themselves and have little empathy for Elly [1].  

In About Elly, Farhadi has pulled off a tour de force that cinematically evokes aspects of Michelangelo Antonioni’s work, which also often involves complex ensemble acting performances. Indeed Farhadi remarked in a recent interview that earlier Italian filmmakers had a major influence on his development. Particularly comparable here is Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), which also begins with a group of people on a holiday that is disrupted with the early disappearance of what appeared to have been the major character. But while Antonioni’s focus in L’Avventura eventually centers on two remaining characters, Farhadi accomplished the more difficult feat of maintaining the narrative focus on the entire ensemble throughout About Elly.  It’s interesting that Farhadi manages to maintain the visual coherence of this collective interaction without using as much complicated moving-camera cinematography as was employed by Antonioni.  Unfortunately, Farhadi again resorts to shaky, hand-held camera framing in order to evoke emotional agitation.  To me this technique is distracting and ineffective.  On the other hand, I must admit that the in-the-water close-up cinematography used in the rescue of Arash scenes (how could this be done without agitated framing?) is convincing and very effective.

The acting performances in About Elly are uniformly superb.  Golshifteh Farhanai's performance in the role of Sepideh is particularly compelling, but all the principal characters have distinct personalities and associated social proclivities that are consistently and believably sustained throughout the film.  As the tension mounts during the various crises, each person responds in a way that drives the organic behaviour of the group forward.  This is what makes the ensemble performances work so well and achieve a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Of course, there is a special Iranian flavor to what goes on in About Elly. As you would expect, there is the nuanced social backdrop concerning how men and women behave towards each other, particularly inside a traditional culture such as Iran’s that is also influenced by modernism. But there is also an even more specifically interesting Iranian cultural attitude that should be highlighted in this connection, and that concerns the cultural attitudes about literal truth.  In general, I would say that Iranians have a stronger-than-usual cultural inclination to avoid telling people what they don’t like to hear.  And this can often involve concealing the truth.  This tendency to prevaricate may be culturally reinforced by the Shia Islamic tradition of taqiyya, which sanctions hiding the truth in certain circumstances. The disposition to occasionally mislead is also probably supported by the famed Iranian tradition of social etiquette, known as taarof, which directs people to speak and act with the utmost courtesy.  One might argue about the proper boundaries and limits of such practices, but their sustained existence in Iranian cultural behaviour offers clear evidence that successful social interactions go beyond black-and-white utterances about what is true and what is good for the overall group or society.  In fact many times we don’t know exactly what is true, and mere adherence to a literal, but uncertain, truth about something may not lead to the most “positive” (an admittedly interpretation-dependent term) course of action.  Thus in the final verbal exchange that takes place in About Elly, Sepideh evidently lies one last time.  Was this final lie ultimately a selfish act?  You can reflect on what her reasons may have been for doing this and whether or not you agree with them.
★★★★

Notes:

1. The Farsi word in the title, ‘Dabareyeh’, means ‘concerning’ in English and has been translated as ‘about’ in the English version of the title.  But ‘about’ has additional connotations in English beyond ‘concerning’, including 'around' or 'nearby'.  This injects some extra suggestive meaning into the English form of the ironic title.