Darbareye Elly
Asghar Farhadi (2009)
Thanks to the success of A Separation, Asghar Farhadi’s previous film About Elly was released in the UK in 2012. A group of middle-class Iranians travel from Tehran to the shores of the Caspian Sea for a three-day holiday. Most of the group know each other from university days. They include three married couples: one of these, Shohreh (Merila Zarei) and Peyman (Peyman Moaadi), has two young children, a boy and a girl; another couple, Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani) and Amir (Mani Haghighi), has a little girl. The third couple, Nassi (Rana Azadivar) and Manouchehr (Ahmad Mehranfar), are childless and there are two unattached adults in the party: Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini), who was a student with the others and who’s recently returned to Iran from Germany after a failed marriage; and Elly (Taraneh Alidousti), who teaches Sepideh and Amir’s daughter at nursery school. Elly knows and is known by only Sepideh among the adults. The holiday gets off to a bad start when the group arrive at the villa which Sepideh had booked from Tehran, only to be told by the elderly woman in charge of the place that its owners are returning next day. She offers them another villa, right on the coast but in a poor state of repair. The party have little option but to accept this alternative and set about making the villa habitable for their stay.
It soon emerges that Sepideh has invited Elly along principally to introduce her to Ahmad – Sepideh jumps the gun remarkably when she lies to the old woman at the villa that the pair are on their honeymoon. Ahmad and Elly tentatively take a shine to each other nevertheless and, as the first evening in the villa progresses, Elly, who’s initially shy and reticent, seems increasingly comfortable in the convivial company. It’s impossible to get a phone signal from the villa and, shortly after the group’s arrival, Ahmad and Elly drive a little way away to buy some food supplies. Elly makes a phone call from the car: she tells her mother in Tehran that she’s with a group of work colleagues at the seaside. The following morning, Elly’s relaxed mood of the previous evening has disappeared. She unhappily tells Sepideh that she must return to Tehran immediately. Sepideh dissuades her and Elly agrees to keep an eye on the children while the wives are out and the husbands are playing a ball game on the beach. Shohreh and Peyman’s son Arash swims out to sea and disappears from view. Desperate attempts are made to find him, and he is eventually rescued and revived. It’s only when the crisis with Arash has passed that the group notice that Elly is missing. This time the search in the sea is unavailing. Elly is never seen again.
Asghar Farhadi’s screenplay for A Separation was constructed with great care, and so is the story he tells here. He doesn’t forget what gets said in the early stages – and a great deal is said: the cross-currents of conversation within the group on holiday are various and so rapid that the subtitles are difficult to keep up with. Most of the conversation is jolly but Farhadi builds into the exchanges, and the characters’ actions, a complex of obfuscations, evasions and untruths. He makes full use of these in due course. Up to and including Elly’s disappearance, the film is completely absorbing – as a description both of a group of old friends and of an outsider to such a group. Farhadi shows that, while the outsider is at a social disadvantage, they also have a position of power through being an unknown quantity. The latter theme is reinforced by what happens to Elly: the others assume that she’s drowned; so does a viewer of the film – but we never know whether she died trying to save the child or if she meant to go under. The moment in which everything seems to change in About Elly has an impact comparable to that of another famous turning point on a beach, in Camus’s L’Etranger, and the scenes of panic that follow the disappearances of Arash and Elly are brilliantly staged.
Elly’s departure is pivotal and catalytic. A Separation also centred on a particular, crucial and uncertain event and Farhadi’s scrupulous plotting paid handsome dividends in the later film: there was a powerful traction between his revealing what actually happened and, in the course of doing so, revealing things we didn’t know or hadn’t suspected about the characters and their lives. About Elly doesn’t work so well as A Separation in its second half – Farhadi’s neat construction tends to reduce the mystery of Elly and her sudden absence. It’s evident from quite early on that she’s anxiously hiding something about her life in Tehran. (It turns out she has a fiancé (Saber Abar) there). And the exposure of cracks in the couples’ marriages that follows on from Elly’s disappearance is rather schematic – especially in the case of Amir and Sepideh, who’s presented pretty unambiguously as the cause of most of what goes wrong on the holiday.
In his Sight and Sound review which was used as the BFI programme note, Philip Kemp suggests that Farhadi is presenting ‘a critique of the lies and evasions that permeate Iranian society’. This may be true but the characters in About Elly are educated liberals – and their values, to Western audiences anyway, are therefore distinct from what we assume to be the prevailing values in Iranian society. It’s difficult to see them as exemplars of it. I found the male characters in the film more individual than the women: perhaps that’s intentional on Farhadi’s part – an illustration of the constraints on female self-expression in Iran – or perhaps it’s a result of my not being able to read what may be the more subtle range of expression of the actresses concerned. (And perhaps those two things are linked, anyway.) This is a minor criticism, though: the ensemble acting in About Elly is very fine and if I single out Peyman Moaadi (Peyman) and Shahab Hosseini (Ahmad) for special praise it may be only because I know them from A Separation and so was impressed by the completely different characters they create here.
26 October 2012
