Film: The Past

Today was film; Meetup isn't exactly hopping with events. I Vitelloni is no longer showing on Mubi - but the next-highest rated is The Past, which is still showing, and which I was actually much more interested in, having seen a couple of the Iranian director's previous offerings.

It was a little late in the afternoon when I started watching - but as I say, I was keen. Now, I adore films that tell a story without talking - and, as shown here, Asghar Farhadi is a past master at it. The film opens with a woman picking up her estranged husband at the airport and driving him back to her place - and for minutes, there is no dialogue. They're on the opposite side of a partition when we first see them, and afterwards it's the sound of the pouring rain, the traffic.. When they get back, almost the first thing she does is dry her hair, and all we can hear for a bit is the hairdryer. It happens again several times throughout the film - no dialogue for a bit, just background noise. Fantastic stuff - when we don't need dialogue, there is none, and we have a chance to absorb what's happened so far, and to observe the characters.

So, the story is, she's asked him to return to France (where the film takes place) to finalise their divorce. He's Iranian, you see, and apparently returned there when they split up. However, he discovers he's walked into a minefield - nobody seems to be telling the truth (or at least the whole truth); he asked her to book him a hotel and she didn't, but is putting him up instead; she has a new partner she didn't tell him about (who's living with her!); the new guy has a son, and a wife in a coma; she didn't tell the kids he was coming; and her elder daughter, who knows him from before and missed him, has taken to staying out all evening because she disapproves of her mother's new relationship, only coming back to sleep..

And believe me, that's not the half of it - the divorce turns out to be the least complicated part of the whole thing. He asks her, in one scene, why she dragged him into all this.. his being there makes things more complicated, of course, with the new partner being jealous and the teenage daughter taking her stepfather's side against her mother. But you know what? He's the sanest person in the film. A good cook, a good listener.. and as the story unravels, he unwittingly becomes the catalyst for the opening of a whole Pandora's box. The rows, later in the film, are a perfect contrast to the long periods of silence.

It's a beautiful character study, with a nice detective story thrown in there to keep our attention (why is the guy's wife in a coma?). Elegant and stylish - highly recommended. Available till Saturday on Mubi.

What's on Mubi could be relevant, as Meetup's only offerings at the moment for that day are in person (which I can't yet get to, with travel restrictions), or on BBC's iPlayer, which I can't access from abroad. If I'm back on Mubi, the next-highest rated offering is Woman at War, an Icelandic film about a woman whose environmental activism may threaten her ability to adopt a child.