About Elly

About Elly

At the end of act one in “About Elly,” Asghar Farhadi’s tense new film, the title character vanishes. Elly (Taraneh Alidousti), a young schoolteacher, has gone on a weekend trip with a group of her closest thirtysomething professional couples from Tehran; she’s supposed to be watching three little kids who are playing on the beach, and then suddenly she isn’t there anymore. The fact that her disappearance sets up a mystery that will propel most of the rest of the movie is why reviewers have been drawing convenient comparisons to Antonioni’s “L’Avventura” ever since it premiered nearly five years ago.

The scene immediately after our last sight of Elly reminded me of something quite different: Spielberg’s “Jaws.” Most of the grown-ups are playing volleyball behind the villa where they’re staying when two of those same kids come running up from the beach and start screaming about the third. It takes them a few beats to figure out what they’re saying, but as soon as they do, they race around both sides of the house, realize that the third kid a little boy is nowhere in sight and start jumping into and diving under and generally throwing themselves at every wave in the Caspian Sea.

I won’t tell you how it ends except to say that I think Spielberg would admire Farhadi’s white-knuckling through this section. Everything is moving when these Iranian men run into this ocean not just them or even their frantic wives coming out from behind them or kicking open doors above them or anything else on land nearby.

The characters are moving; so is all this water; so even is some part of what we see as we move with all these people everywhere along this crowded sand: We seem to be looking desperately in every direction at once back toward (and then away from) where we’ve come from, up and down the beach some more, back toward (and then under) the sea as it crashes ever forward. The way Farhadi times all this movement is complicated, and we experience it with such physical force that I think very few people will make it through without having held their breath at least once.

So what are we to make of a film made in Iran whose terms are broad enough to include both “L’Avventura” and “Jaws”? One answer might be that Asghar Farhadi is not like other Iranian directors. When filmmakers such as Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf started making international waves in the late ‘80s and early ’90s, their movies looked formally, at least like European modernist cinema; even when newer directors like Jafar Panahi began giving this general approach a more commercial turn around the end of that decade or when someone such as Majid Majidi continued doing so into this one, these films were still unmistakably speaking the language of the international art house.

Farhadi’s “A Separation” (2011) tried something different and ended up becoming the most successful Iranian film of all time, as well as the first to win the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and it did so by working at both ends. First, Farhadi didn’t follow in the footsteps of those filmmakers but two less familiar Iranian masters: Dariush Mehrjiu (“Leila”), whose films often focus on Iran’s upper middle class, and Bahram Beyzaie (“The Travelers”), whose background is in theater (as is Farhadi’s). Second, he acknowledged some American influences: Elia Kazan and “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

“About Elly” represents all the tendencies of Farhadi’s mature style just as brilliantly as “A Separation,” but it is not a sequel to that film; in fact, it was made just before it and won the Silver Bear at Berlin in 2009 then sat on a shelf for years due to complicated rights issues that have only now been resolved for its U.S. release. Its belated appearance should be cause for celebration among cinephiles, who will take from this writer-director’s earlier work yet another sign of his unique talent.

One such skill is a mode of dramatic construction that resembles an onion: The outer layers seem familiar and transparent enough, but each successive level deepens the complexity until things are quite convoluted indeed. In this case, we start with what looks like an entirely happy and carefree outing where three couples many of whom have been friends since law school motor out to the Caspian Sea for a weekend holiday. One wife has invited along pretty Elly, her daughter’s elementary school teacher, hoping obviously to fix her up with Ahmad, a good looking buddy who has just returned from Germany after getting divorced.

For Americans who know few or no Iranian films, or only those set among the poor and dispossessed, the characters here may come as a surprise. With their BMWs, fading T-shirts and constant joking around, they could be cosmopolitan urbanites anywhere. Yes, their Iranian-ness is underlined by certain kinds of music and dance, and by the fact that all the women wear head-scarves throughout (something required by law in Iranian films) though even these are worn casually and stylishly.

As in “A Separation,” we can see some tension between this class of privileged professionals and the stratum of poorer, more pious Iranians immediately below them; but here that’s mostly peripheral to things, as when the Tehranis pretend Elly is Ahmad’s new wife so as not to offend the religious sensibilities of the country folk who rent them the villa.

From one white lie to another and the discovery of different personal motives: peeling away these layers of onion skin reveals hidden truths upon hidden truths, and those that follow Elly’s disappearance are deeper and darker than those before it. But when I read that a Sight & Sound writer has said this is all “a critique of the lies and evasions that permeate Iranian society,” I can almost hear Farhadi groaning, because he has been quoted in interviews saying he doesn’t want to be one of those filmmakers who are expected “to explain Iran to the West.”

In fact, the filmmaker makes it clear that what he aims for in “About Elly” is not so much socio political as it is cinematic: “[D]irectors can no longer be content with force feeding [audiences] a set of preconceived ideas. Rather than asserting a world vision, a film must open a space in which the public can involve themselves in a personal reflection, and evolve from consumers to independent thinkers.”

Farhadi’s films do indeed “open spaces,” both literally and figuratively. In fact, one of the most interesting things about Iranian cinema – from its meditative use of space as symbol or metaphor to its poetically or documentarily suggestive uses is how great Iranian directors articulate visual space.

But this involves more dynamics and multi-layers on Farhadi’s part; technically virtuosic too: enough so that we could compare him even to “Jaws” or indeed “A Streetcar Named Desire.” To anyone going to see “About Elly,” I would say this: look at the early scene where they arrive at the villa with the boy whose family is renting it to them four couples and three kids.

Watch how ace cinematographer Hossein Jafarian’s gliding hand held camera registers the untidiness of some rooms while glimpsing through windows/doors at the seascape outside, and continually reframes characters to set up a hugely intricate and involving web of relationships between them.

There are some neat little moments here. For example, two quick shots of the host boy: in one he glances out the front door at two kids on the beach a prefiguration of the lost child scene mentioned above; in another he gives a brief caustic look after one Tehran man’s silly dance this is as eloquent a statement about class difference as any dissertation.

Farhadi is so good with actors, and here he gets from his cast (which also includes Golshifteh Farahani, Peyman Moadi [“A Seperation”], Mani Haghighi and Shahab Hosseini) performances that are both detailed and vivid. You could say that Farhadi doesn’t have any grand message, or “world vision” as he puts it. But for me, his way of making cinema alive again, and connecting its spaces to those of human hearts/minds, is vision aplenty.

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