It’s a bold move on Asghar Farhadi’s part to give his latest The Past a roughly similar startpoint to his global breakthrough A Separation: a couple meeting with the intention of signing their divorce papers. What follows is both variation on and expansion of a particularly discordant theme. This time, we’re in the Parisian suburbs rather than Tehran, and judging by the distance put between its ex-lovers in the opening frames, it’s clear some considerable upheaval has already taken place. A Separation was just the warm-up, a storm in a teacup; this time, a whole crockery cupboard teeters on the brink.
Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) has flown from Iran to formalise his separation from his French wife Marie (Bérénice Bejo) – or perhaps, given the open return he’s travelling on, to talk her into giving it one more go for the sake of their offspring. At any rate, Marie has kindly agreed to put Ahmad up for the duration of his stay, although over the first night, it becomes apparent she has a new man. From the moment the brooding Samir (Tahar Rahim) returns from work, there really are three people in this marriage.
Early scenes economically sketch a home that, in everything from the wet paint on its doorless walls to the fraught and tentative relationships it houses, is very much under construction. Bridling against Marie’s neatfreakery, Samir’s young son Fouad (Elyes Aguis) throws a colossal strop, demanding to be returned to his “real” home. But that home’s similarly breaking up: we soon learn Samir is himself married, to a woman left comatose after a suicide attempt apparently sparked by her husband’s affair with Marie. It is, how you say, complicated.
This is the genius of the Farhadi approach: to take characters whose social status might otherwise see them comfortable, and then show them becoming frazzled by an accumulation of everyday incidents. “It’s the small things that set you off,” muses Ahmad to his mournful eldest Lucie (Pauline Burlet), and the film is riddled with such annoyances: allergies, sudden rainstorms, ringing phones, stained clothing, a lost suitcase. (Farhadi is subtle enough not to dwell on the multiple meanings of the word “baggage”, though we might.)
However melodramatic certain plot developments get, there are at least another two or three that could happen to you or I, which is why Farhadi remains such a valuable and pertinent filmmaker: his films don’t require supervillains to threaten the world, because they take the world as it is, full of irritations enough to generate their own friction and drama.
He’s again aided by a cast who prove only too willing to flaunt their fraying nerves. If you only know Bejo from her beguiling work in The Artist, her appearance here – that of a woman nearing the end of her tether – will come as a genuine revelation. Farhadi equally mines thematic payloads from his male leads’ vague physical resemblance, and he’s particularly alert around children: no mere onlookers but potential collateral damage, the stepsiblings are every bit as crucial here as the young supporting actresses were to A Separation.
If The Past doesn’t quite have the same impact as its predecessor, that may be something to do with the difficulty of capturing lightning twice in a similar place, and because the ruthless, thriller-like cause-and-effect of A Separation is here replaced by a more cyclical structure. As Ahmad’s stay extends into a second, third, even fourth day, we’re left to watch these people stomping over the same old ground, gradually grinding both themselves and those around them down.
Such passive aggression only offers further grist for Farhadi’s mill, however, and the film’s remarkable dramatic weight pins you to your seat until the ambiguous final image: an inversion of the opening, dependent on a tiny wrinkle that may significantly alter the futures of everybody we’ve spent the past two hours watching. As the man said: it’s the small things.
(MovieMail, March 2014)
The Past screens on BBC2 tonight at 2.05am.
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