Sometimes in the past, we may have done things that don’t leave us. We distance ourselves from others, refer to being busy or feeling unwell, but the problem is that the past haunts us. People are afraid to admit what they have done for fear of consequences. However, the longer it takes, the worse it can get. This situation faced the main characters of the psychological drama “Secrets of the past”.
Synopsis Ahmad arrives in Paris to finalize his divorce from Marie, whom he broke up with four years ago. Arriving at the scene, he learns that Marie has been living with her new boyfriend Samir for several months, from whom she is expecting a child. Suddenly, Ahmad becomes involved in a family quarrel, which reveals a secret from the past of one of the family members that can turn everyone’s life upside down forever.
The film should be honored at least for the sake of the incomparable play of actors. First of all, I would like to note Ali Mosaff for the role of Ahmad, an involuntary participant in family troubles, who did not withdraw, but decided to help the heroes get to the truth. I also liked the emotional play of Berenice Bejo in the role of Marie, a caring mother who can not understand herself, and therefore is not able to find permanent love. Finally, the real nugget was Pauline Burle in the role of the eldest daughter of Marie Lucy, a sensitive teenage girl who became the link in the whole drama played out.
While watching the film, you feel that “Secrets of the Past” is an author’s film. Iranian director Asghar Farhadi shot a soulful psychological drama with elements of a detective thriller. The main theme he puts in the spotlight is the secrets of the past, which sooner or later will come to light. The director makes the viewer understand that the family and emotional crisis that the main characters are experiencing is connected with their past, which they persistently tried to forget. However, from a certain moment there is an explosion, and it remains only to establish what remained more or less whole.
The main pillar on which the whole film rests is, of course, its script. The main character of the Persian Ahmad comes to France at the request of his ex-wife Marie to observe the formalities, formalize a divorce and go to his homeland. However, arriving in Paris, the hero realizes that everything in Marie’s life is not as smooth as it might seem. Constant quarrels with the son of the groom, a teenage daughter, returning home late, and the groom can not forget his ex-wife, who is in a coma after a suicide attempt. The key link is Lucy, who is at odds with her mother. Ahmad believes that this is a teenage dislike of the new boyfriend of the mother, but the reason is much larger and more serious, which reveals unpleasant secrets. As a result, the whole story leads to an unexpected denouement in the style of “and the killer was a gardener”, putting all dots on the i.
Result Although Secrets of the Past may seem like a boring and incomprehensible film, I still think it’s a very good work about human relationships and how important it is not to be afraid to tell the truth, which can be cruel, but which is much easier to survive than sweet lies.
8 out of 10
The name of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi thundered around the world after the Oscar ceremony, where he took the statuette for the family drama “The Divorce of Nader and Simin”. He decided not to stop there, but to continue the topic of complicated family relations. But this time he shot his film in France with foreign actors. Initially, the main female role was predicted by the main diva of the French art house Marion Cotillard, who, alas, could not agree on working schedules. But at the same Oscar ceremony, the director met the star of “Artist” Berenice Bejo and it was to her that the main role eventually passed. It was such a good choice that in place of Bejo now it is impossible to imagine any other actress.
The story turned out to be as simple and realistic as possible, without causing any doubt that ordinary people live their turbulent lives on the screen. As in Farhadi's previous work, it all begins with Ahmed flying to France to sign divorce papers with Marie. The couple broke up a few years ago, but now the main character is building a relationship with another man Samir and trying to find a common language with the eldest daughter, who does not recognize the authority of the mother. With a plea in her voice, Marie asks Ahmed to talk to Lucy and find out the reasons for the strange behavior. But there are too many secrets of the past in this family. If you get one, the rest will sprinkle next, revealing new details from the lives of the heroes.
Surprisingly, for all the intimacy of the situation and the few characters, Farhadi mixed so many different nuances into one cauldron that this tangle of difficult relationships will be unraveled for a very long time. First of all, the line of Marie with Ahmed is interesting. It seems that the feelings are long gone and the case is inexorably moving towards divorce by mutual consent. But they continue to work out the relationship as full-fledged spouses. Second, an important part is the relationship between fathers and children. This is where my sympathies are more on the side of men. Moreover, both Ahmed and Samir turned out to be quite reasonable fathers who know how to establish contact with children, which cannot be said about the hysterical Marie. Thirdly, the line of Samir’s past relations is interesting. I still want to know the reasons why his wife is in the hospital in a state of coma.
The film itself is overloaded with detail. Events develop slowly, but the director stubbornly continues to feed us family squabbles spoon after spoon for two hours. Eventually, it starts to bite. Although the main moral of the fable is quite simple. If you want to open a new door, close the old one first. The problem with all the characters is that they really want a new life, but they keep dragging their baggage from the past with them. Marie wants a divorce but is not ready to let Ahmed go. She doesn’t need a man herself, but she holds in her heart her resentment for leaving her. Samir is trying to rebuild his personal life, but his wife is also behind him. Even little Fuad is ready to love a new home and another mother, but can not give up the memories of his own mother. The finale is open, so the director gives us the opportunity to close or open the right doors. In general, the acting of Berenice Bejo, Tahar Rahim and Ali Mosaffa did not disappoint me, but I expected more from the plot.
A good deed is not called a marriage, but a divorce is even less pleasant. Ahmad arrives from Iran to France to transfer his break with Marie from a de facto state to a de jure one. On the way, a suitcase breaks down, the heroes psychologically break each other, and in general everything in this European life is broken and hastily glued to create the appearance of family intimacy, which has long been absent. Marie’s family is a boat without a rudder and a building without clamps, perhaps because she’s bringing Ahmad to her home, truthfully and untruthfully, to sort out the deadlocked relationship with Lucy’s daughter and perhaps to direct her relationship with her future husband, Samir. Everything, of course, will settle down, but there will be no deliverance: the secrets of the past pull the burden of problems that are too late to solve.
This film is simply doomed to comparison with the previous film by Asghar Farhadi, whose Divorce of Nader and Simin Europe remembered and even fell in love. To some extent, “The Past” symbolizes the successful “marriage” of the director with European cinema, although both films shamelessly dilute the viewer, without giving direct answers to complex questions. Partly because the answers to them do not exist (family squabbles — a tangled web of words said and not said — can strangle anyone), partly because of the desire to meaningfully sly in a scripted field plowed to the horizon; after all, nothing warms the author’s self-esteem as a spectator who reflects on the polyvariance of his plots. However, the sunny, warm in color scheme "Divorce" is much more cozy: there is a sincere love of father and daughter, son and elderly father, there is an oriental generosity of emotions and spice of traditions; yes, in addition, with a beautiful gesture, an open finale, which is actually not needed, because it does not matter with whom the girl will remain, it is important that she will be bad in any case - the family should not be divided into halves, she and the family to be whole. “Secrets of the past” lead to where Simin so longed – to Europe, gray, cloudy, cold Europe, where the very concept of family has lost its original meaning, and people – spiritual connection between themselves; where there is no warmth due to the fragmentation of opinions (and what warmth between the swan, cancer and pike?), where there is no love, because in quarrels, resentments, omissions and secrets, love is lost like the disappearing Amur tiger in the Far Eastern taiga. But again there is an open finale, so open that it blows out of it: uncertainty is curled up by the cosmic eight, and Farhadi as a weakling moves aside, because it is impossible to unravel the carefully intricate tangle of it - and the past hangs over the head of a swollen storm cloud, and the future does not bode well.
What really brings the pictures together is the detective element hidden in the plot. In "Secrets" it is not even a secret, but an unconscious crime, real, with serious consequences. But in order to get closer to the solution, one has to wade through long piercing scenes of clarification of circumstances, through such a polygon of relations in which all psychology, following geometry, becomes non-Euclidean. The movie resembles a Latin American series not only by the number of characters, but by the constant déjà vu of dialogue: the same episode is told endlessly to find new details at each stage. This is like a game of “Contact”, when hints and gradually revealing details need to guess the word and establish contact with each other. It is only by the end that it becomes clear what happened to Samir’s first wife, why she tried to kill herself, who was to blame and what she did. Here, by the way, is the cliché: all adults are guilty to varying degrees, although only the disinterested Ahmad tries to understand. It was he who had to calm down Lucy, oppressed by a sense of guilt, it was he who would reach the hysterical Marie and make him show the character of a strange, unsympathetic Samir. Ahmad is a kind of anchor in this stormy sea, thanks to which the passengers of the sinking family boat still saw the shore, learned to speak and hear, understand and be understood. Perhaps the main character is a reflection of Farhadi himself, who sees in the European version of the family incorrectness, growing out of a total lack of communication and a complete unwillingness to look for it. The root problem of society is egocentrism and insensitiveness, which generates understatement, which, in turn, gives a distorted picture of reality, distorted relationships, distorted feelings. Distorted in the crooked mirror of half-truths.
However, the message is not limited by geography. With his filmography, Farhadi almost shouts about the disintegration of family ties in any society, whether Eastern or European, After all, the family as a cell of this society is also its foundation - without it we will turn into a humanity of lonely and unhappy individuals, separated, speaking an incomprehensible surrounding language. The Babylon of our days is a fertile topic, but, by the way, cinema does not make grandiose discoveries, limiting itself to a qualitative disclosure of the psychology of characters (actors play brilliantly, even - and especially - children) and manipulations with the plot canvas. If you follow the same well-trodden path, then one day the director will reach the divorce of an African woman with a Japanese against the background of the degradation of the family institution of some New Zealanders, but one hopes that he will turn somewhere else. Because Farhadi certainly didn’t want to create an image of marriage as a suffocating, engrossing, hopeless quagmire in which everyone and everything is suffocated and perished – and with Secrets of the Past, something like that happened. Moral? Don't lie or hide the truth. Believe, fear and ask. Banal, as always, truths.
Four years ago, Iranian Ahmad (Mosaffa) and Parisian Marie (Bejo) broke up. Marie met another man, Samir (Rahim), and then asked Ahmad to return to Paris for a short time to formalize his divorce. During his visit, Ahmad accidentally delves into the personal lives of Marie, her two daughters, and Samir and his young son. Trying to calmly resolve complex, everyday issues, Ahmad launches a series of events that will inevitably lead to the appearance of the notorious “skeletons in the closet” of both Mari and Samir.
I had three reasons to watch Secrets of the Past. The first and most important is the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi. I really liked his previous film, The Divorce of Nader and Simin. It was a brilliant, psychologically nuanced work that became the best "foreign" film at that year's Oscars. I wanted to make sure that Farhadi was a really great director, and Divorce wasn’t his random, solitary success. The second reason is actress Berenice Bejo. Not that I was a fan of her, and I only saw her in Artist, but I liked her there. And the third reason is the success of “Secrets of the Past” among festival critics and getting into the nomination for the “Golden Palm Branch”. Each of these reasons alone may not be enough, but together they “forced” me to watch this tape.
I have to admit, I liked Secrets of the Past much less than Farhadi’s previous film. Despite the fact that the plot of “Nader and Simin’s Divorce” was set in Iran, everything that happened on the screen caused a keen sense of recognition. I like life movies, where the characters get into some difficult situation, while remaining multifaceted and ambiguous personalities, rather than screen functions that perform the role of black and white. I love when there are no clearly expressed right-wing and guilty in the film, and when I have to think about what I would do in a similar situation. That’s what I expected from Secrets of the Past, and for some reason, unfortunately, I didn’t wait. I was not close to the problems of the characters of this film, I did not feel their anxieties, and I did not feel “different” feelings for these characters. That is, what I had an opinion about each of them at the beginning of the film, it remained at the end.
Of course, “Secrets of the Past” has its merits. It is primarily an acting game, especially Tahara Rahim and a little boy named Elie Aghi. Berenice Bejo, in my opinion, lacked the range, the whole film she showed quite the same type of emotions, which nevertheless turned out well. It's the same problem with Ali Mosaffa -- it's all in one spot, no particular variety.
“Secrets of the Past” is a good, but frankly festival film, which seemed to me a little more distant from ordinary people than “The Divorce of Nader and Simin”. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be the other way around. Household dramas are remarkable – you never know what will cause a response in the soul and generate a sense of “recognition”.
7 out of 10
Club of lovers of creativity Krzysztof Kesliewski. Regular hearing
The script of this film deserves the work of two famous Krzysztofs – Pesevich and Kesliewski. There will be a very piquant and confusing family situation, its dynamics, explosions of emotions and curtsey to humanity. In the end, there will not be a single “villain”. In each of the characters will be a lot of humanity – it will be important only to find it.
In truth, I am surprised by the confidence with which many viewers of this film, who share their reviews on the film, claim the influence of Islam as the key to understanding this film. The creed of the characters is not even discussed, and regardless of ethnicity, each of them is part of the multicultural reality of Europe. On the contrary, the basic fundamental values come to the fore, just bringing everyone closer together.
Returning to the script, we must certainly pay tribute to the creators who suggested a situation in which the ex and future husbands of the same woman try to reconcile her with a rebellious daughter from her first marriage. Soon mysteriously revealed the tragedy associated with the attempted suicide of the wife of the future husband. And this suggests a detective story in its essence. Search. Reflection. Tolstoy’s sublime experiences (the hero Ali Mossaf will answer for this) and everyday sharpness, not restrained even by caring for children (Tahar Rahim and Berenice Bejo will note here). In the end, all the questions will be answered, but the problem will not disappear – too conflict tilt will put the author. And here you can begin to discuss psychological undertones, motives, characters. But should I? Excessively protracted, overloaded with dull episodes and ultimately leading us to the most understandable humanistic slogans, this film is uninspiring. The focus on the story is too much. When the ambiguities clear up, there is nothing else to look at. The average level of acting, smooth and skillful, but not incendiary, also did not bring benefits. Boring, measured, boring actors give us their performances. And so, perhaps philosophical attempts to understand everything and “grab by the tail the meaning of what is happening”, which Mossaf offers us and will be interesting to someone. But to me, they seemed empty, and the whole situation was far-fetched. Perhaps the point is that the pace of the narrative is too slow, not corresponding to the seething life. But there's a reason. It looks like real life, but not interesting at all. That's it.
The most hated of all those who are permitted to be divorced is Allah.
Prophet Muhammad
The past trip across the three seas was more than successful, showering Asghar Farhadi with all sorts of top-notch awards as if out of a cornucopia. The Iranian government first claimed victory over the Zionists on the cultural front, and then banned the celebration of the Cannes and Oscar winners. Is it any wonder that Farhadi shot his new film already in Europe and two years later his “The Past” again did not go without the attention of the Cannes jury, who celebrated the film with two prizes, but the festival race “Grand Slam” is not yet completed.
The script, written by a laureate Iranian co-authored with Massoueh Lahiji, recounts the divorce, but it is not a sequel. Here, events take place in modern France, a country with a new face, changed by the influx of migrants from former colonies (and beyond). In the center of attention is a classic triangle: de facto, four years as an ex-husband - Iranian Ahmad; de jure, his wife Marie Brisson is a pretty pharmacist, now French, born in one of the countries of the Maghreb and a new candidate for husbands, and for now the cohabitant and owner of dry cleaning - Arab Samir. In the course of the story, the triangle acquires new angles in the form of children from different fathers (this is Marie's 3rd divorce), and then there is an invisible image of Samir's wife lying in a coma after a suicide attempt. In the epicenter of such a complex figure, immediately upon arrival from Tehran, Ahmad gets. He could have stayed home. But Marie asked him to participate in the divorce process. She promised, but did not book a hotel room for Ahmad, and he had to huddle in Marie’s cramped house for several days, in company with her, her friend and now strangers’ children. What is the reason for this forgetfulness? She wanted him to talk to his stepdaughter, Lucy, using her trust in him, but is that all? Perhaps the emotional connection still persisted and she was counting on the last chance, or maybe she just wanted to demonstrate her relevance to people of the opposite sex, they say – everything is great for her, but Oscar Wilde said about this: “If a man once loved a woman, he will do anything for her.” Except one thing: keep loving her. Ahmad is ready to help, to the best of his ability, trying to break through the main problem. Speaking the same language, people do not hear and do not understand each other because of a series of omissions, or even just walls of silence. The usual words of truth have to be extracted bit by bit and this partly helps to unravel the tangle of contradictions.
The film turned out to be very European, no, even French, and in something similar to the new film by François Ozon. There is also a complete lack of morality, since the story is about the life of ordinary people as it is, with all its absurdity, which sometimes presents such twists of fate and inexplicable rational actions that they are easier to borrow from life than to invent. Farhadi in his film does not answer questions, but asks them. He says he just doesn’t know the answers. This is not only a concept, but also a philosophy. Asghar Farhadi once said, “If you give an answer to the audience, the movie ends in the cinema, but when you ask questions, it actually starts after people have seen it.” The film will continue inside the audience. It is important to think for yourself and allow the viewer to think.
In the implementation of this author helped a wonderful cast. Expressive neurotic Marie played, known for “Artist”, Berenice Bejo. The problem of her heroine, who does not form long and strong family unions, is not at all in men, only in her. The actress has a great sense of humor, allowing her to talk about herself with self-irony. “I sleep with a director to make a good movie,” she said, referring to her husband and the father of their children. The role of Ahmad is very intelligently played by Ali Mosaffa. Nervous breakdowns of the hero in the past, now in his soul peace and tranquility, and, in the near future, he is not ready to part with freedom. Tahar Rahim played Samir, a man facing a difficult choice. His emotional experiences are conveyed very accurately. All characters want to step into the future, but the past weighs a heavy burden. It is impossible not to mention the children who played flawlessly. Their characters are the hardest. “As you don’t share a family, there is still a child left behind.”
Perhaps the main thing that attracts Farhadi’s paintings is that his world is multipolar and does not boil down to the confrontation of good and evil, although they are present in his paintings, but are divided between all the characters. He does not divide them into good and bad – black and white, preferring all colors and their multiple shades. Often we judge a person and the motivation of his actions superficially, and therefore incorrectly, because we are based on insufficient information. The picture is not pronounced, but a call to dialogue with the need to hear each other’s questions is clearly felt. And to think, to think, to think, as bequeathed not yet great, but therefore no less remarkable Asghar Farhadi.
9 out of 10
Asghar Farhadi once again takes up the story of a difficult relationship concerning love experiences, and, as always, does his job perfectly. This time, the Iranian receives a nomination for the Palme d'Or, and also involves the best French actors of the decade - Berenice Bejo and Tahara Rahima in his film.
The story told in The Past is not about the experiences of young hearts, which are described in the vast majority of love films, but about relationships between adults, accomplished people. They have no passion or passion, but they do not become less complex and important. What happens on the screen is restrained and emotionally muted, as is the color scheme of the film, consisting of shades of brown and gray.
Among other things, the "Past" very interestingly executed credits, which somehow convey the mood of the whole film, indicating the instability and uncertainty of what is happening in the lives of the characters. The relationship between ex-husband and wife, her new lover and children from previous marriages is really complex and with each minute of the film opens up from new sides. And this is not a simple playfulness, which very often can be seen in films that try to be called deep-thinking, but the real, genuine, which is still confidently able to produce and display only the European segment of cinema. A seemingly understandable story about the complexities of divorce suddenly turns into a real conflict with many sides, and then into a real drama. And everyone involved in what is happening is not only a conditional actor, but also an independent subject, around which many of their own plot twists and turns are tied.
The director introduces the viewer to the course of things gradually. As in a good novel, the action develops gradually, overgrown with new and new details. Although the narrative is conducted in a fairly smooth, calm key, it does not blow boredom and tension, as it happens in author's films, which claim originality, confusing it with pretentiousness. “The past” does not reveal its intention immediately, as well as good perfumes that show notes of their fragrance over time.
Asghar Farhadi and Massumeh Lahidji did a good job writing the script, which is a very complex composition, not in terms of sharp plot twists, but in terms of very elegant dialogue and respect for the viewer, before whom the essence of what is happening is revealed very consistently and gradually. Each of the characters of “The Past” has its own character and its own difficult history, and this is an achievement that the vast majority of films do not possess.
Farhadi once again shows that the relationship between people is one of the most complex and unanalyzable substances. And to understand who is bad and who is good is not always possible, and one way or another the past will remain with you forever.
“East is East, West is West, and they cannot meet together” – perhaps it was this laconic and artistically decorated idiom, expressed more than 100 years ago, Rudyard Kipling condemned all those who spoke about the possibility of finding a dialogue between these two opposites. Nevertheless, many artists, both real and imaginary, tried to challenge this thesis, showing in every possible way their vision of a joint synthesis of Western practicalism and Eastern wisdom in many areas of art; cinema also did not escape this, periodically becoming a testing ground for such experiments.
Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, who shot the well-known film “The Story of Ellie” and “The Divorce of Nadir and Simin”, whose triumph again forced to talk about Iranian cinema as a real phenomenon, slightly forgotten after the successful works of Mohsen Mahmalbaf and Abbas Kiarostami, in his new work decided not to stray far from the successful theme, but to try to remove it in the synthesis of the traditions of Iranian cinema and the artistic specifics of European art house.
The main character of the film Ahmad, an Iranian citizen who has lived in France for several years, leaves his homeland and travels thousands of kilometers for one formal moment - signing a divorce agreement with his French wife Marie. While ex-spouses come from completely different cultures, one thing that unites them at some point is the constant confusion, the search for something new to get basic satisfaction from the feeling of life, which is constantly nearby, but, like a butterfly, disappears at the last moment. Ahmad, a fairly correct and sensitive person whose emotional sphere has known more than one internal breakdown, is infinitely grateful to Marie for the love she bestowed on him during one of these crises. However, happiness has been fleeting, and Ahmad, struggling with a new crisis, prefers to simply run away. His trip is an attempt to thank his ex-wife, albeit in this way, by signing formal papers granting "legal freedom."
Marie, for whom Ahmad was the third husband, lives on the verge of internal breakdown, for whom only a new novel is a way to save her identity from final destruction. For her, Ahmad remains somewhere in the distant past, and in order not to break again, she falls in love with Samir, an Arab immigrant who owns a laundry room and raises a young son. It seems strange to Ahmad that the huge estrangement that has formed between Marie and her eldest daughter Lucy, this indestructible barrier of misunderstanding that has divided people’s relatives. However, Samir, at first angular and silent, begins to open up from the other side, opening Ahmada a connection with his past - still in a coma first wife, whose suicide attempt is shrouded in a halo of very strange circumstances.
What immediately catches the eye is the endless attempts to weave into the frame of the plot about family relations, filmed in the good traditions of Iranian cinema, elements of European cinema, which sometimes look good, and sometimes seem too artificial and unnatural. The constant alienation of the main characters, the detective story, gradually disappearing from the narrative, seem to be created under the obvious influence of Antonioni’s tapes; the element of accidental error and subsequent repentance almost directly quotes Joe Wright’s Atonement, and the social atmosphere of despair resurrects in memory references to Odiyar’s latest works, like Rust and Bones. Of course, the main miscalculation is the stated ending: surprisingly poetic and perfectly shot, it gives good advances for further in-depth analysis, but ends at the most unexpected moment. It seems that Farhadi, too carried away by the topic of family quarrels, too late decided to reveal the true essence of the tape, making only a serious hint, which follows nothing further.
However, despite some secondary and script flaws, this film is definitely not attributed to artistic failures. The triumph of the film at the Cannes Festival is well deserved and in advance allows the director to take into account all previous mistakes in order to prevent them in the next film; and if we talk about the created images of the main characters, the Bejo-Rahim-Mosaff trio plays almost to the limit, making the viewer admire this beautiful work again and again.
“East is East, West is West, do not converge,” but you can always try. This attempt can be considered successful.
It would seem that many similarities with the famous “Divorce of Nader and Simin” promised that “the Past”, at least, will not concede to him.
From the very beginning, the director, as before, expresses his author’s position with all the tone of the film: divorce is more a tragedy than an honest act of liberation. Here, more than in the previous tape, he highlights the source of this tragedy: children. As two years earlier, Asghar Farhadi wrote an ethically and psychologically complex and even radical human history. As in the “Divorce of Nader and Simin”, it almost to the very end leaves the viewer with a set of unknowns, and, gradually revealing the details of events in the past of the characters of the tape, he forces the viewer to reconsider their views on the motivation and experiences of the characters.
However, despite all this, in my opinion, Asghar Farhadi lowers the bar, primarily because he never managed to escape their shadow of psychological drama. Having become entangled in them, the director remained at the level of private history, without climbing to another, more metaphysical, level. And the ending of the tape in the context of the whole story, although it gives the viewer hope, but this hope turns out to be very doubtful if, following the realism of the tape, you look behind its curtain. What’s more, “The Past” was even more European than “Nader and Simin’s Divorce.” And the ethnicity of the main characters of the film looks more like a formal tribute to the Iranian director of his culture.
Still, even if Asghar Farhad’s The Past is considered a step backwards, his directorial level is so high that The Past has not become an ordinary family drama. I believe that is why the jury in Cannes did not bypass the picture, even if not in the main nomination.
A kind of sequel to Asghar Farhadi's previous film - "The Divorce of Nader and Simin", abundantly and even overly fondled by critics and audiences. This time, the director is true to himself and removes a painfully ordinary story, where the viewer is forced to observe 2 hours of incessant tantrums and clarifications of relations, when the characters see each other, but do not hear. And the theme of the past that does not let go goes out in mediocre directing, stretching the film on one note, for the sake of a really beautiful ending. But he is also an alien body, since nothing leads him to it, and he is here insofar as Farhadi is unable to stop disputes between the characters otherwise, because he himself is stuck in the search for worthless petty problems in the surrounding life.
Judging by the reaction of critics, the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi has good chances and this year to slip into the short list of nominees for the award "Oscar" for the best film in a foreign language. And not only because he literally shot the sequel "Divorce of Nader and Simin", and for the reason that not all directors adhere to such versatility and consistency, and at least the presence of the film "Past" among the nominees will certainly increase the intrigue of receiving the award in this category.
Although it is worth warning at once - "Past" his more in-depth study of the problem than was seen in "Divorce", hence the film itself pursues lethargy and boredom during viewing. But, probably, from this, the director received recognition that his films are characterized by his thoughts “for later”, which are not always possible to catch simultaneously with viewing the first time.
This time, the protagonist, a native of the former heir country of the former Persian Empire - Iran, comes a few years away from his "French" family back to France in order to finally settle the legal formalities of divorce with his wife. What is most interesting, unlike "Divorce", in this case there are no references to the fundamentality of religion, here, as they say, the dish is served immediately ready.
Confessing viewers of Islam, or those who are more familiar with religiosity, will find it easier to understand the many episodes that flash through the picture. Although the “ethnic Muslims” themselves do not show signs of their beliefs in this film, they say salaam only once. But the director, in addition to the general background of the film script, clearly gives out elements of a behavioral nature in the frame - whether it is in communication with his daughter, with his wife, or the future husband of his "former" wife.
The problem of the film "The Past" is the complexity of the problem itself, and this problem is not purely situational in nature, but stems from the past of the main characters, the present, and even the future. Accept such a load during the viewing will be able absolutely not every viewer, with this idea the director, of course, overdone. But, what is worth noting in this film, albeit taken from nowhere, but this is an incredibly beautiful finale, which subconsciously says that two hours of traction was worth such mercy.
7 out of 10