`The Past` reviewed

 

This is the second of the 2013 London Film Festival offerings that I saw on its first showing at the Curzon Chelsea last night. Directed by Asghar Farhadi (who also made the award-winning `A Separation` some 2 years ago – see my Review of 2011), it is an intense psycho-drama from the perspective of Ahmad (Ali Mousaffa), Iranian husband of Marie (Berenice Bejo), the central female lead, who returns to Paris from Tehran after a four year separation to finalise their divorce at her behest. He is immediately drawn into her dysfunctional and emotionally draining relationships with her teenage daughter Lucie (Puline Burlet), her, Marie`s, new lover Samir (Tahar Rahim) and his rebellious 10-12 year old son Fouad, with many strands to their interactions and daily lives.  He tries to understand the dark layer of antipathy and bitterness and to mediate between the warring parties, and to generally keep them from falling further apart as he resumes his former role as the gentle, kindly father figure to Lucie.      

 

The Past as title is intriguing because what we are treated to really is a snapshot of the Parisian characters` present, as it were, during the 3 or 4 days that Ahmad is visiting them – the precise timeline is not spelt out - though in order to make sense of it he does have to dig into what has led them to the point where they are at.  To that extent, their immediate past is relevant. He sees this in all its raw complexity. The plot thickens when it is revealed that it was Lucie who had shopped Marie`s love-email exchanges with Samir to Samir`s wife Celine which had apparently led to her attempted suicide and to end up in a coma as a result.  As if this was not complicated enough, we also learn that Celine had suspected Samir to be having an affair with his illegally employed shop-assistant who in turn had provided Lucie with Celine`s email address out of a grievane of her own.  We also learn that Marie is pregnant with Samir`s child and that she has had several previous affairs, facts which are a running sore with Lucie and contributed to her sense of anger and alienation.  

 

All these stark and shifting realities are played out as the narrative moves along at a relentless pace, with strong echoes of `A Separation`, particularly in the court sequences, though the divorce itself proceeds less dramatically and acrimoniously than in the earlier film. The Paris backdrop is captured in minute and fascinating detail. Every performance is superb, especially that of the child-actor Elyes Aguis who plays Fouad. His anger tantrums (symptomatic of a psychological trauma caused by the actions of the adults around him) in the scene where he violently kicks at the door of the bedroom when he is locked in by an angry Marie, or the one when he is made to apologise to Ahmad for raiding his suitcase for the presents that Ahmad had brought for the children, or where he refuses to leave the metro train while travelling home with Samir, are all executed absolutely brilliantly.

 

The movie ends inconclusively, and that merely reinforces its underlying essence as a portrayal of all the principal characters - of Marie and Samir, of the semi-grown-up Lucie, and also of Fouad and his playmate Lea, another but much younger daughter of Marie who watches them all as a silent, helpless observer - at a critical period in their unhappy lives. Do we feel compassion or empathy for any of them?  For the children certainly but none for Marie, who is least deserving, and a little for Samir.

Ahmad however remains largely an enigmatic outsider. So just as he wades into the situation, like the lone rider with a mysterious past in a western who comes in to clean up the town`s baddies, so we too are merely witness to a family drama that slides into a slow denouement. He came, he saw and he left. The past is over.

This film, like `A Separation`, too will no doubt win Farhadi well deserved plaudits. 

               

RAMNIK SHAH
(c) 2013
Surrey, England