Asghar Farhadi / Iran/France / 2009 / 119 min
The connection between western consumerism and Iranian professional society is regularly explored in Middle-Eastern and Asian film. It’s just easy to forget it given alienating “terrorist” discourse on TV. Directors like Asghar Farhadi have brought this matter to international attention over the last few years and he continues along the same track in this weighty drama.
When a group of middle-class families travel to the beach from Tehran, they have to make do with fairly rickety accommodation. Working together, they tape up the broken windows and clean the place up. But soon, one of the party goes missing (Taraneh Alidoosti) – the only unmarried female member, who’s also the outsider after being invited on a whim. Feared drowned, the families try to recount the steps leading up to her disappearance.
Farhadi unravels a whodunit-esque set of mysteries and revelations throughout this film. The claustrophobic and escalating sense of panic is quite typical of his storytelling, using elements of farce stripped of its physical humour and wrestling with detective thematics. It’s a similar power study of the family that made A Separation achingly emotive; About Elly predates Farhadi’s breakthrough release, and here the director questions how members of a unit can all become culprits, or at least accessories, if they shield the truth.
The force of Farhadi’s tragedy is that it’s so invasive. Elly’s potential death symbolises a great deal; it could be a punishment for Iranian liberal guilt which has adopted many bourgeois attitudes, or it may act as a sacrifice to reaffirm certain gender roles in Iranian society, namely that women ultimately suffer at the hands of oppressors. The imagery of the rolling surf, either as a visual metaphor of cleansing and purification, or simply as a hint of something constant, metrical, even predetermined, adds to the multilayered subtext of Farhadi’s film. Whatever reading assumed, this is penetrating, sometimes heartbreaking cinema.
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