About Elly (drama) (2009)
(1 hr 59 mins)
With A Separation (2011), Asghar Farhadi
became the first Iranian director to win an Oscar for best foreign film. Now
his previous film, About Elly (2009),
has been given a limited UK cinema release. Catch it if you can because it is
an outstanding film, exploring personal relationships, moral dilemmas and the
dangers of deception.
Three
married couples, old friends from university, set out on a weekend trip to the
Caspian Sea. Elly, a young nursery school teacher, is invited along by Sepideh,
the mother of one of her pupils. Sepideh is trying to match-make, hoping
Elly will hit it off with the recently divorced Ahmad. The party is due to stay in a comfortable
villa but the woman in charge tells them they can only stay one night. To get
the woman to let them stay the whole weekend in another villa, Sepideh tells
her that Elly and Ahmad are on honeymoon.
After some
initial game-playing and banter, during which the friends are appraising Elly
and deciding whether she would make a suitable wife for Ahmad, Elly reminds
Sepideh that she can only stay one night. Sepideh presses her to stay longer
and hides her luggage and mobile phone to stop her phoning for a taxi.
Matters take
a sudden turn for the worse when Elly is left on her own at the beach to look
after the children and promptly disappears, feared drowned. This leads to
recriminations among the adults, and matters become complicated when they find
Elly’s mobile phone and realise they have to notify her family. What seems like
a simple task turns into a series of moral dilemmas as they discover that
Sepideh has omitted to share with them some pertinent information about Elly’s
personal life. Should they tell more lies to spare her family further pain or
tell the truth?
After the
opening ten minutes or so, when the characters are being introduced, the film
becomes utterly gripping, initially as we wonder what the mysterious Elly makes
of the others and particularly of Ahmad, who is trying to take things slowly
but is clearly smitten with her. When Elly disappears, it dawns on the others
that they actually know very little about her or her family, which soon leads
to complications they could not have envisaged. Subtle plot twists ramp up the
emotional tension as the characters argue, cajole and harangue one another.
What starts as a simple tragedy threatens to escalate into a situation none of
them can control.
The script,
written by Farhadi, is outstanding. Just when you think the film is about to
reach a resolution, it takes off in another direction, creating more dilemmas
for the characters to wrestle with. It touches on interesting questions such as
the power relationships between men and women in Iranian society, whether it is
right to tell lies to try to avoid causing pain to others, and the way people
try to control others in subtle ways. The acting and direction are excellent
throughout.
The final
scene shows the characters trying to push a car out of the wet sand as the tide
comes in. Try as they might, they cannot shift it. It is a fitting image for a
film in which ordinary people wrestle to cope with an extraordinary situation.
The film won
the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival and was Iran’s
submission for an Oscar for best foreign film. It was voted by Iranian critics
the fourth best Iranian film of all time. Look out for the DVD release of
Farhadi’s earlier film, Fireworks
Wednesday (2006), which came out in Autumn 2012.
Rating: 10/10
No comments:
Post a Comment