Le passé
Asghar Farhadi (2013)
A woman stands at the entrance to an airport. She keeps trying and failing to catch the eye of a man inside; since she’s outside and they’re divided by the glass frontage of the building, she can’t make him hear either. When he does eventually see her, they greet each other amiably, even affectionately. It’s pouring with rain and they dash to a car – getting suddenly soaking wet sustains their laughing affability. By the time they reach the woman’s home, however, the atmosphere between them has become irritable – not least because he was expecting her to book him into a hotel. That glass partition, with the problems of communication that it implies, is hardly an original idea but Asghar Farhadi’s finely detailed development of the mood in the next few screen minutes of conversation in the car draws you in: the past has several aspects in The Past and you very soon want to know more about the history these two people have shared. The woman is French and her name is Marie. The man is Ahmad, returning to Paris from his native lran. They are married but Ahmad has come back to sign divorce papers. Marie’s ménage includes Lucie and Léa, her two daughters from a relationship which preceded her marriage to Ahmad, and Fouad, the young son of her new lover Samir, who is tactfully intending to spend most of his time at his own flat for the duration of Ahmad’s short visit.
From A Separation to a divorce: the first part of The Past is a penetrating description of the ramifications of a relationship which is formally about to end and of another relationship, at an earlier stage but already mired in difficulty. Farhadi builds up the tension between Marie and Ahmad so expertly that, as they arrive at her small, unprepossessing house in the suburbs, you share his evident apprehension of what’s to come. On the way back there, they had stopped off to pick up sixteen-year-old Lucie from the lycée she attends but she’d already left: it turns out Lucie spends as little time at home as possible, and rarely speaks to her mother, because she’s so strongly opposed to Marie’s setting up house with Samir. His son Fouad is almost permanently angry – when Ahmad first reappears on the scene, kicking-and-screamingly so. Although it’s clear that Ahmad will try to be a peacemaker, at least with the children, the sweet-natured younger girl Léa is the only easygoing personality in the household. Almost any remark seems to hit a raw nerve, almost any movement is a step in the wrong direction – and this feel likes a natural extension of the conflict that grew on Marie and Ahmad’s car journey from the airport. Farhadi and his cast realise the tensions between the characters in different registers, not all of them openly hostile. When Samir is on the premises, the way that he and Ahmad keep a wary distance from each other, in the early stages at least, is particularly convincing.
Making the divorce a legal fact is one of the few straightforward and definite elements of The Past. Because Farhadi at first concentrates mainly on Marie and Ahmad, you expect to find out how their marriage died. You learn that Ahmad suffered from depression and left the family to return to Iran but the focus of the story gradually moves towards a different death – or near-death – in the more recent past, the attempted suicide of Samir’s wife Céline. Eight months ago, when she found out about the affair between her husband and Marie, Céline went to the dry cleaners where Samir works and drank detergent in front of him and Fouad. She’s been in a coma ever since. How Céline came to find out about the affair, and the role and motives of others in the days and hours leading up to her suicide attempt, become the heart of the film. Each of the characters in The Past is a believable individual but several of them have in common the desire for what happened to be conclusively explained. Yet, as in A Separation, Farhadi is sympathetic towards each person and withholds simple attributions of responsibility, let alone blame. The pivotal Céline isn’t seen until the film’s closing minutes. The hospital carries out tests to see if she registers any kind of response to the smell of familiar perfumes: when Samir arrives for the results, a doctor tells him there was no reaction but that this isn’t proof of Céline’s being brain dead; a nurse mentions to Samir that in fact they tested only a couple of the perfumes that he brought in. Samir hesitates as he makes his way out with the box of perfumes. He turns back, goes into Céline’s room and sprays on his neck the aftershave she always liked. He asks her, if she’s aware of the scent, to squeeze his hand. The camera freezes on his hand and hers. There’s no sign of pressure being applied by Céline but you can’t be entirely sure.
This closing sequence is a metaphor and a visualisation of the central theme. Like the glass partition at the start, it’s obvious enough but Asghar Farhadi is so meticulous and nuanced a film-maker that watching The Past is a richer experience than a synopsis can suggest. The film is perhaps more limited than either About Elly or A Separation in that, although Farhadi creates many shades of grey, the mood is mostly sombre (and the rain it raineth symbolically): the sequence in which Ahmad, on his first night back in France, cooks an Iranian meal for the children and temporarily wins Fouad over is a welcome relief. There’s the odd moment when something goes wrong implausibly – as when Samir takes Fouad back to his place and gets off the metro train without checking that his uncooperative son has followed him onto the platform. But faults of this kind are few. The experience of North African and Iranian immigrants working in France is a significant element in the story and the key locations aren’t typical ones for Paris on screen – Marie’s dowdy house, the pharmacy where she works, the dry cleaners, a café run by an Iranian-Italian husband and wife team. Although Bérénice Bejo won the Best Actress prize at Cannes last year for her performance as Marie (and she is remarkably different here, after The Artist and the negligible Populaire), the acting is so skilfully orchestrated by Farhadi that I didn’t feel anyone stood out: the whole cast is excellent. It includes Tahar Rahim (Samir), Ali Mosaffa (Ahmad), Pauline Burlet, Jeanne Jestin and Elyes Aguis (the three children), Sabrina Ouazani (Naima, who works with Samir at the dry cleaners) and Babak Karimi and Valeria Cavalli (the café owners).
7 April 2014
