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
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
www.cinemaguild.com
“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.
New York City-born French filmmaker Eugène Green equates humanity and architecture in the lush, rich film La Sapienza. Named for the concept of gaining wisdom as well as Italian architect Francesco Borromini’s seventeenth-century Roman Catholic Baroque church Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, the film follows an older couple who rediscover their personal and professional passion after meeting a young pair of siblings. Architect Alexandre Schmidt (Fabrizio Rongione) and his wife, sociologist Aliénor (Christelle Prot Landman), are walking through a park in Switzerland when they see a teenage girl (Arianna Nastro) nearly collapse into the arms of a slightly older boy (Ludovico Succio). It turns out that Lavinia is suffering from incapacitating dizzy spells and is cared for by her brother, Goffredo, who is interested in studying architecture. Aliénor becomes involved in Lavinia’s situation while Alexandre, an intense, cynical man, returns to the book he is writing on Borromini (who famously worked in the shadow of Bernini) and travels to Italy with Goffredo as the boy’s reluctant mentor. Green’s (Toutes les nuits, Le monde vivant) first digital feature opens with the glorious sounds of Claudio Monteverdi accompanying cinematographer Raphaël O’Byrne’s magisterial shots of statuary and architecture in Rome. The acting at the start, particularly Rongione’s, is purposefully stiff and mannered, cold and stonelike, but it warms up as the characters learn (or relearn) about the myriad possibilities life offers. Green, who also appears in the film as the grizzled Chaldean, uses the metaphor of Baroque architecture’s role in the Counter-Reformation as a symbol for Alexandre and Aliénor’s relationship, as they finally face long-held emotions and reconsider their future, all while Green lingers on magnificent structures.
Film Forum’s “Orson Welles 100” festival, a wide-ranging celebration of the centennial of the iconoclastic auteur’s birth, continues with another terrific double feature on January 23-24. In 1947, Welles followed up the creepy black-and-white Holocaust thriller 
