Friday 14 September 2012

"About Elly" (Moviemail 14/09/12)



Though it emerges in the UK after A Separation, About Elly… is the film Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi completed immediately prior to starting work on that award-winning opus. If the later film dropped us into a warzone from the get-go, the tactics Farhadi deploys here are altogether more lulling. It begins as ensemble drama – a Farsi Big Chill, if you like – as a group of extended family and friends rent a villa for a weekend away by the sea. Initially, it’s all drinking and clowning around, charades and volleyball, as Farhadi hones in on the contrasting personalities of the two women at the group’s centre: spirited young mother Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani) and her reticent acquaintance Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti), a teacher back in Tehran who, despite efforts to matchmake her with a fellow guest, appears weirdly isolated, even before the incident that brings the fun and games – joltingly, shatteringly – to a halt.

What we’re watching is the making of a director who – almost as though in reaction to the slow, observational cinema of Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf et al. – has resolved to pitch himself headlong into situations spiralling rapidly out of control. At pivotal moments here, the previously unobtrusive camera will go rogue, careening alongside those characters now running through the frame, either alarmed or aghast – and you can’t fail to spot A Separation’s striking immediacy taking shape. About Elly… is fascinated with fallout. The group closes ranks and begins pointing fingers at one another; the glowing tans of this utterly convincing ensemble fade to pallid masks, behind which everybody struggles to conceal their secrets; the once-happy holiday home starts to look like the shabby shack it always was; and the sound of the sea lapping against the shore, once so soothing, comes to rub the characters up the wrong way, eroding nerves, patience, their sense of security.

If there’s a difference between Elly and A Separation, it’s that the former is less overtly political. A Separation was in part a study of the system that made it harder for ordinary Iranians to get on with their lives; Elly’s characters are well-enough positioned to get away from Tehran, and they face a tragedy that could happen to any set of people anywhere. At a stretch, you could read the cover-up the group engineers as an indicator of how easily corruption comes to rear its ugly head in this society. (The film begins and ends with a vote, one more crucial than the other.) More often About Elly… operates on or around the same pitch as those screams of quiet horror old Antonioni movies used to give off, faced with our continued inability to really know those around us.

About Elly opens in selected cinemas from today.

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