Todos lo saben
Asghar Farhadi (2018)
With the help of his DP José Luis Alcaine and editor Hayedeh Safiyari, Asghar Farhadi draws us in from the start of Everybody Knows. The opening sequence takes place inside a church clock tower, where pigeons flap and the ancient clock machinery creaks, both to unnerving effect. We then watch someone – or, at least, the right hand and forearm of someone – cutting out newspaper articles about a girl’s kidnapping. This introduction, suggesting that a traditional thriller-mystery is on the cards, gives way to a longer, more subtly unsettling episode. Over the course of the next twenty minutes or so, Farhadi introduces the guests arriving for a wedding in a small town outside Madrid (it takes all that time and more to work out exactly who’s who). During the wedding and its immediate aftermath, the camera seems to be peering at the action, as if trying to penetrate the surface social whirl and celebration. The sometimes unexpectedly angled shots and the cutting help increase our sense of disquiet, even though nothing at this stage – except for one scene – is overtly ominous.
For the grown-ups, the partying goes on into the night, when a power cut in the town deepens the darkness. Shortly after the lights return, the intoxicated wedding guests are shocked back to their senses by the discovery that one of them, the teenager Irene (Carla Campra), has disappeared. Newspaper cuttings left in the bedroom where she had been sleeping are familiar to us and so, alas, is much of what follows. The very first sequences were, after all, a taste of things to come – though Everybody Knows turns out not to be a conventional thriller-mystery: it doesn’t have enough incident or plot convolutions to qualify as that. It is, rather, a predictable account of how a crisis gives new prominence to old secrets within a family and brings to light things that everybody knows (the phrase occurs repeatedly) but nobody says.
There’s a hefty clue this is the direction in which Farhadi, who also wrote the screenplay, is heading in the above-mentioned exceptional scene, which occurs midway through what’s otherwise the strongest section of the film. This takes the form of a return visit to the clock tower. While the wedding service is taking place in the church below, Irene goes up there, accompanied by a young man called Felipe (Sergio Castellanos). Irene is the daughter of Laura (Penélope Cruz), one of the older sisters of the bride Ana (Inma Cuesta). Laura, Irene and the latter’s younger brother Diego (Iván Chavero) have travelled from their home in Buenos Aires for the wedding. Felipe is the nephew of family friend Paco (Javier Bardem), who, with his wife Bea (Bárbara Lennie), runs a successful vineyard in the area: they too are wedding guests. In the clock tower, Irene tries to flirt with Felipe, who tells her that Laura and Paco, years ago, were lovers: the evidence is there in their initials carved on the walls of the tower, which is also a belfry. The bells were due to peal at the end of the wedding service but Irene and Felipe set them off prematurely, taking the bride, her groom Joan (Roger Casamajor) and the rest of the congregation by surprise. It’s a resoundingly significant moment: Asghar Farhadi drops a clangour.
Reviews describing Everybody Knows as a ‘channelling’ of Agatha Christie et al are understandable, even though Farhadi stints on the entertainments of an orthodox whodunnit. Laura’s and Ana’s elder sister Mariana (Elvira Mínguez) and her husband Fernando (Eduard Fernández) run a hotel in the town. It’s not doing great business so is easily able to accommodate the other dramatis personae for the duration: the hotel becomes the equivalent of a country house mystery setting. Attempts to save the girl whose abduction story is told in the newspaper cuttings ended badly because her family, against the kidnappers’ instructions, involved the police. The need for the principals to keep Irene’s disappearance to themselves and to rely on their own resources to get her back works as a reasonably credible plotline and as a means of reinforcing the story’s central theme of family secrets. When these are exposed, however, they’re a letdown.
Laura’s husband Alejandro is conspicuous by his absence from the wedding. As soon as we hear that work commitments have kept him away, we know this is a cover for something else. Once Irene has vanished, Alejandro (Ricardo Darín) comes over to Spain: it’s soon revealed that he’s unemployed and has a history of depression. We gather that Laura broke Paco’s heart by forsaking him and Spain for Alejandro and Argentina but what she saw in the (much older) man she married is a puzzle – she appears to feel little for Alejandro now. It turns out that Laura’s father Antonio (Ramón Barea) once owned the land that is the site of Paco’s vineyard; he bought it for a song – something the family have silently and increasingly resented with the passage of time. Their own financial circumstances have worsened while Paco’s and Bea’s business has thrived. The most important, and least surprising, revelation is that Irene’s biological father is Paco, not Alejandro – a fact, it emerges, always known by the latter but not known to the former until now. I wasn’t clear if Irene’s paternity was something other members of Laura’s family were already aware of. Even if they weren’t, I didn’t get why, in view of their resentment of Paco’s profiting from land they once owned, he’d been invited to the wedding.
This isn’t the first Farhadi piece to centre on a sudden disappearance but it’s very different from its predecessor About Elly (2009). There’s never much mystery about what’s happened to Irene or, thanks to a series of guilty looks from Mariana’s and Fernando’s daughter Rocío (Sara Sálamo), who within the family enabled it to happen. What’s more, Irene, unlike Elly, reappears – delivered to Paco after he pays the ransom money, before Laura and Alejandro arrive on the scene to take over from him. Irene is asthmatic and has been without medication during the time she’s been held prisoner. She’s not in good shape, there’s talk of getting her to a hospital without delay and we wonder how her condition will be explained to a doctor. Not only does Farhadi ignore that last point; he also gives Irene nothing to say subsequently about her ordeal, identifying her kidnappers, etc. All she does is to ask Alejandro why it was Paco, rather than he, who came to find her. If she gets an answer from the man she’s always assumed to be her biological father, she gets it off-screen. By now, Farhadi, though continuing to ram home the same point, is exasperatingly evasive. In the closing scene, Mariana, who’s sussed out Rocío, sits Fernando down and says they need to talk. We don’t get to hear the conversation about their daughter but it’s fair to assume this will remain a well-kept secret between them.
Asghar Farhadi’s next film after his international breakthrough with A Separation (2011) was, like Everybody Knows, located in Europe. The Past (2013), set in Paris, featured a few Iranian but mostly French actors. This new movie is inferior to The Past but Farhadi once again impresses with his handling of a cast speaking in a language that he doesn’t himself speak. The way he allows or encourages the telegraphing of Rocío’s feelings is a rare lapse: otherwise, the high quality acting not only holds your interest but often has the effect of distracting you from the script’s manifold weaknesses. Everybody Knows is disappointing – but disappointing in large part because Farhadi’s previous work has set our expectations high. And although this is finally a poor film, it features, especially in the narrative that precedes Irene’s kidnap, some very good filmmaking.
21 March 2019
