by Flynn Shan Benson
Worth: $8.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Sydney Film Festival
Cast:
Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, Pierre Niney, Catherine Deneuve, Adam Bessa
Intro:
… leaves its audience nostalgic for better movies.
While film moves in the direction of the digital and the virtual, so that distribution refers to the transfer of files, home viewing means streaming, and film writing is increasingly found online, there is a contrary movement towards the analogue and tangible for those among us who invest their identity in film culture: screenings of 35MM film gain a new aura, the ‘cinematic experience’ becomes something to be preserved, and DVDs take on the cachet of vinyl.
Such a consciously analogue spirit animates Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi’s new film Parallel Tales (a loose remake of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s A Short Film about Love) and its protagonist Sylvie (Isabelle Huppert), a Parisian writer who drafts fiction on her Olivetti and remains blissfully unaware of Goodreads.
Though this scenario appears to be an oasis of concentration and artistic attention, we soon learn that she does not have any inspiration to draw out from the depths of her soul, so she instead looks to an apartment across the street and watches a young blonde (Virginie Efira), a dark-locked beau (Pierre Niney), and a gaunt older man (Vincent Cassel).
She only sees this trio engaged in the work of foley art — the pointedly old-fashioned creation of sounds for film audio tracks — she fictionally remakes them as characters in a pulp novel: trysts, coincidences, passion, and violence all ensue.
But all this, as Sylvie’s agent (Catherine Deneuve, in effectively a cameo) tells us, and as we already know from sitting through these overlong dramatisations, is not what people find entertaining any more. Instead, a genuine force of creativity enters the film via the figure of Adam (the French-Tunisian actor Adam Bessa), who, through a contrived good deed for Sylvie’s niece, finds himself working as her assistant. With a complete disregard for subtlety, Farhadi couples his entry with the discovery of a rat infestation in the apartment.
Adam, who shows more imagination, if not more literary talent, than the ageing writer he serves, secretly takes possession of Sylvie’s manuscript and introduces its fictions to its real life counterparts, with predictably chaotic consequences.
There is something endearing about how these characters all share an unlikely internet-free existence, so that a piece of fiction can have as much of a hold over them as it did over Emma Bovary. But the implausibility of the scenario would be of more interest if there were some major point of drama, some incisive point to be made about the relationship between representation and reality — or if Farhadi simply showed the same dramatic verve as in his
brilliant earlier film A Separation. Instead, the audience is left with a film that takes an exceedingly long time to say very little, a drama where the uninspired pulp provides little contrast to the sections of ‘real life’ that follow it.
Perhaps the most intriguing reading of Parallel Tales is as analogous to the director’s own creative life: the Middle Eastern artist himself achieved international recognition and plaudits with the aid of European festivals and Academy Awards, so that he was no longer confined to his native Iran but could make films in France and Spain. Now, in this film, just as Adam takes Sylvie’s work for his own artistic glory, Farhadi works with the grand dame of French cinema and pays homage to one of the great European filmmakers. It’s a shame, then, that it just leaves its audience nostalgic for better movies.
