An uneasy Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti) is hiding something in Asghar Farhadi’s shattering ABOUT ELLY
ABOUT ELLY (DARBÂREYE ELI) (Asghar Farhadi, 2009)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
April 8-21, 12:45, 3:15, 6:45, 9:15
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“A bitter ending is better than an endless bitterness,” Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini) tells Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti) in Asghar Farhadi’s shattering, masterful 2009 drama, About Elly. Iranian writer-director Farhadi, whose A Separation was named Best Foreign Language Film at the 2012 Oscars — the film also earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay — won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2009 Berlinale for About Elly, which also nabbed Best Picture at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. But rights issues have held up its U.S. theatrical release, depriving American audiences of a chance to see the work. Now that the film is finally opening here, beginning a two-week run at Film Forum on April 8 in a new 35mm print, the story of the film’s distribution is no longer bitter, but the searing tale itself couldn’t be more harrowingly acerbic. A group of upper-middle-class law school friends have come to a Caspian Sea villa from Tehran for a getaway weekend organized by Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani), who has brought along Elly, her daughter’s teacher, as a potential love match for the recently divorced Ahmad, who has been living in Germany. Because of a scheduling snafu, they have to stay in a seaside house in desperate need of renovation, but the friends just go with the flow, singing and dancing and making the best of the awkward situation. But the playful atmosphere turns sour when tragedy strikes, leaving everyone to reexamine who they are.
A group of friends has to face some hard truths during vacation gone terribly wrong
About Elly is a gripping, deeply thoughtful, and intensely intelligent exploration of class, romance, responsibility, culture, family, and, perhaps most of all, honesty in contemporary Iranian society. Although the film evokes such works as Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura and François Ozon’s Under the Sand, Farhadi (The Past, Fireworks Wednesday) infuses it with a profound sense of realism, involving the audience in its intricate, intimate mystery. You’ll feel like you’re on the beach with the friends, facing the same agonizing decisions. Shot in a naturalistic style by cinematographer Hossein Jafarian, About Elly takes place in a ramshackle vacation house, designed by Farhadi, that doubles for the characters’ psyche, with its broken windows, stuck doors, and lack of privacy. The scene in which a young boy goes missing in the ocean is as terrifying as it is heart-rending, a breathless extended sequence of events that feels like it will never let up. And indeed, the powerful emotions continue through the rest of the film — and will stay with you long after. The outstanding cast also includes Mani Haghighi as Amir, Sepideh’s husband; Peyman Moaadi and Merila Zarei as Peyman and Shohreh, the parents of the boy; and Ahmad Mehranfar and Rana Azadivar as another couple caught up in the tragedy. Fingers are pointed, bonds are tested, and relationships are fractured forever in Farhadi’s exquisite jewel of a film.
Based on the wonderfully titled Tomáš Končinský short story “Julius Schmitke slipped through death’s fingers like an awkward seal,” Czech director Štěpán Altrichter’s debut feature, Schmitke, is a darkly comic, Kaurismäkian character study of a middle-aged engineer making his way through a pretty simple life. Julius Schmitke (Peter Kurth) wakes up each morning, watches the coffeemaker get going, walks about slowly, stares a lot, and follows the story of a Bear-Man living in the German woods. A bear of a man himself, he is disappointed when he is reassigned — demoted — to fix a broken wind turbine in the small, foggy Czech border town of Chřmeleva in the Ore Mountains. Meanwhile, his grown daughter shows up unexpectedly, moving in with him and declaring, “I invested my energy wrong!” Schmitke and his new partner, the young, rather talkative Thomas Gruber (Johann Jürgens), head out in their white van, getting lost before ultimately arriving at their destination, where everyone, including the mayor (Jakub Žáček), hangs out in the local pub, drinking all day. But when Gruber suddenly goes missing, Schmitke sets off on a desperate search to find him — and, perhaps, himself in the process.
In Bertrand Tavernier’s sweeping romantic epic, young and beautiful Marie de Mézières (Mélanie Thierry) has a big problem: It seems that every man she meets falls in love with her. Already in a passionate relationship with the heroic Henri de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel), a leader of the Catholics against the Protestant Huguenots in the French Wars of Religion of the 1560s, Marie is suddenly part of a shady deal between her father (Philippe Magnan) and the Duke de Montpensier (Michel Vuillermoz), marrying her off to the rather uninspiring though steadfast Prince Philippe de Montpensier (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), who warms to his bride much quicker than she to him. Returning to the battlefield, Philippe asks his mentor, the older and wiser Count de Chabannes (Lambert Wilson), to teach Marie in the ways of the court to prepare her for meeting Catherine de Medici, but even such a solid, moralistic man as Chabannes — who deserted from the army after killing a peasant family, supposedly in the name of his lord and saviour — cannot prevent himself from succumbing to the many charms of his unaware charge. And when she meets the wild and unpredictable Duke d’Anjou (Raphaël Personnaz), the king’s brother is smitten as well. But through it all, Marie, a modern woman who wants to learn to write and make her own choices, remains fiercely drawn to Henri, a forbidden love that threatens dire consequences.
You can add Hagen, the protagonist of Kornel Mundruczó’s White God, to the list of great canine characters in film, joining such esteemed company as Lassie, Benji, Beethoven, Sounder, Old Yeller, and, of course, Cujo. Played by year-old siblings Luke and Bodie, who were discovered by animal coordinator Teresa Miller in the classifieds, Hagen is man’s prototypical best friend — or in this case, the constant companion of thirteen-year-old classical trumpeter Lili (Zsófia Psotta) — smart and caring, loyal and loving, until things go really, really wrong. (Miller trained under her father, Karl Lewis Miller, who worked on such films as They Only Kill Their Masters, Dracula’s Dog, Call of the Wild, Babe, Cujo, and the Beethoven movies.) When her mother (Lili Horváth) and her new husband go away for a few months, Lili is forced to stay with her bitter, unhappy father (Zsótér Sándor), who refuses to register Hagen with the authorities and pay the dog tax. (In Hungary, mixed-breed dogs are taxed but purebred are not in an effort to control the feral population.) He throws Hagen out of their car, leaving him by the side of the road. At first Lili and Hagen try to find each other, but soon the dog becomes entangled in a series of dangerous situations, fighting for his life — and then fighting back, for mistreated mutts everywhere.