Mumbai Film Festival ’13 Review: The Past (2013) Original French Title - Le Passé

Directed By: Asghar Farhadi

Asghar Farhadi had one of those life-altering breakthroughs in 2011 with A Separation, a small Iranian film that quietly premiered in Competition at the beginning of the year in Berlin where it won the Golden Bear, Best Actor (for the male cast) AND Best Actress (for the female cast). This was before it was unleashed upon the world and went on to become one of the most lavishly praised films of the current generation. The movie was very widely seen and appreciated, covering the widest spectrum of cinephiles. From IMDB voters to highbrow critics, A Separation had one and all calling it an immense new work and it heralded the announcement on the world stage of a major new talent in Asghar Farhadi, who ended his journey on that film by accepting an Oscar in front of a billion strong live audience.

Naturally his new film had a built in fan base and huge expectations to appease. Even his festival berth was upgraded from a Competition slot at Berlin to the obviously more momentous Competition slot at Cannes. And so just how good is The Past?

Not very, I am afraid. The Past finds Farhadi again working in a similar register to A Separation narratively as well as formally. It depicts an Iranian man Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) returning after years to France to divorce his French wife Marie (Bérénice Bejo) who is now living with another man Samir (Tahar Rahim) and his children. The central drama arises out of Luci’s ((Pauline Burlet) Marie’s grown up daughter from another marriage before her marriage to Ahmad!) rejection of her mother’s marriage to Samir.

The scenario has the whiff of melodrama from the start but it only deepens as Farhadi piles detail upon detail on this flimsy foundation. This narrative technique worked wonders in A Separation where the cascading deluge of information and multiple viewpoints helped highlight the intangibility of the concept of truth. Here it succeeds only to trivialize the lives of its characters which are boiled down to a few choice details that seem to define them, over which they argue with the greatest conviction as if it were life and death.

And Farhadi even tries to make it life and death in a sense. After pulling in a lot of different directions and throwing out possibilities of multiple tangents along which the drama could proceed, the most interesting of them seemed to me the tension-filled interaction between past and present lovers of Marie, Ahmad and Samir, their scenes positively crackle with awkwardness and are pregnant with drama. Instead the entire conflict and the film reduces to the circumstances of Samir’s wife’s suicide attempt (the failing of which results in her being in a coma for the duration of the film).

Herein lies my central gripe with this drama, of somehow considering the occurrence of a suicide attempt almost necessarily due to abetment. There is a mortal certainty that Farhadi has about it that I find troubling. There is much fretting over who told the poor victim what and how, in the days leading up to her suicide attempt and characters hysterically fight over these details even though it is stated repeatedly that the victim was depressed. It is this insistence by all the characters, and by extension, by Farhadi, this moral certitude, that suicide can and only result from some situation of abetment or some fantastical trigger, that gives me pause. It completely ignores the fact that human beings don’t work with the lucidity of algorithms and that an act as inherently irrational as a suicide attempt would not necessarily have a strong foundation in a causal chain of events.

The pile up of detail isn’t limited to the narrative. Even formally, Farhadi is working overtime to pack in so much information in every single frame and scene that his film seems overwrought. That Samir is a launderer is conveyed repeatedly through his car having clothes hanging and the industry of his shop. Marie’s life as a chemist is also repeatedly shown and depicted, as also the new house being painted and prepared for the new couple’s marriage. One senses a belief in the director that excess verisimilitude equals increased vividness and veracity. But what it basically does is brings the pointlessness of his drama into even sharper relief. His busy mis-en-scene in service of his hackneyed scenario (a word I sadly never imagined I would use for Farhadi!) is akin to combing the hair of a gorilla with a fine-tooth comb.

However I do think the editing and sound design were absolutely fabulous and it is here that Farhadi showed glimpses of the formal mastery that brought A Separation to life. The acting is good for the most part though as the entire scenario seems to be much ado about nothing, so does most of the acting. But Tahar Rahim does typically strong and understated work.

The Past is a French production and that is most obviously seen in the glossy look this film has in comparison to A Separation which was much more soberly arranged. Maybe it’s just the fact that a developed country photographs more prettily than a developing country but it is something that struck me. Here’s wishing this great director a return to form with his next film.

2.5/5