About Elly

Last night we watched Asghar Farhadi's 2009 movie, About Elly. Two or three months ago we saw a later film by Farhadi, A Separation. The latter film was something of a revelation. It changed my view of what modern Iran is like completely. (I wrote about it here.)  About Elly does the same: apart from the fact that the women wear headscarves all the time, there's little to show that we're in a Muslim country. All the trappings of modern life are visible, and there's (mostly) an easy enough relationship between the sexes. 

Both films are about lies and lying. Or alternatively, you might say, about truth, except that truth is very difficult to deal with, and for the characters in these two movies, lies are readily available, and, in the end stand in the way of the characters being able to move forward. 

About Elly starts off in a much warmer tone than A Separation.Three couples (and three small children), a recently divorced friend, and a young schoolteacher come together for a weekend of relaxation at a beach house. Irritating things happen, but not enough to stop the friends enjoying themselves. 

In the first forty minutes or so, the film seems to be little more than an ensemble piece with a wonderful cast almost improvising the script as they go along. So it appears. Characters come and go across the screen randomly while we try and sort out who belongs to whom (and it took us quite some time; we mismatched two of the couples). It seems that the young wife of the oldest man in the group has invited the schoolteacher along in order to match her up with the divorced man, and things are going fairly well. 

Except that underneath all the bonhomie are disturbing currents, none of which we can quite put our finger on. Disaster strikes - but it's not the disaster we think has struck, and Farhadi leaves us hanging for a great deal of the movie as we see the characters deal with what is ultimately a tragedy, by constantly changing their stories, accusing each other, blaming, finding excuses, finally getting to grips with the need to tell the truth, and then not being able to.

Farhadi has an enormous cinematic ease: the camera quietly appears to be just catching things out of the corner of its eye on many occasions, but in other scenes he uses the more disturbing process for the audience of a camera that jerks and shudders in moments of great tension. The actors appear to move as randomly as in real life, yet time after time we see movements in the background that add another dimension to what's being played out closer to us. His control of his cast is exceptional, including the three small children, who play vital parts in the story.

The young wife is played by Golshifteh Farahani, an actress who turned up in another movie we watched recently, The Patience Stone. This was a highly disturbing film set in Afghanistan about a young wife who's husband has been injured in the ongoing fighting, and has gone into a kind of coma. For much of the movie she sits and talks to him, telling him things she could never say when he was alert. It's a considerable indictment on relationships between men and women in that society, and I find it hard to imagine that it would ever be screened in the country it's set in. 

A Separation

Two years ago, Asghar Farhadi wrote and directed the extraordinary movie A Separation.  It's a deeply moving film about a couple in Iran: she wants to leave the country with her young pre-teenage daughter to have a better life; he wants to stay because his father has Alzheimer's, and lives with the couple. She asks for a divorce from the court; the court doesn't think she has sufficient cause because there's nothing wrong with the man and it isn't as if she doesn't love him. From this somewhat unusual starting point the film wends its way through increasing complications as the husband tries to find someone to look after his father during the day, and winds up before the court again on a very different charge. To say how it all pans out in any detail would be to thoroughly spoil the movie if you haven't seen it.
There are lies at every hand, all seemingly small, but all causing further trouble for the liars. The trouble is, the truth is difficult, and sometimes it seems easier to lie in order to get yourself out of a difficult situation. Almost no one in the story is immune from this difficulty, though some try harder than others to avoid the lies.
The Iran in this movie is a very different one from that we generally see on TV in the news. Yes, there are issues over sin, and the women have their heads covered all the time, and the Quran is used as a tool to swear by on several occasions. But beyond that, these are ordinary human beings living in a modern society that has everything any Western society has. For me it was an eye-opener in these terms.
The justice system is different: the plaintiffs and defendants can shift place at the drop of a hat, and there is only one harried, though authoritative, man dealing with each case. No lawyers, and only one or two other court staff in each small room. Dozens of complaints are being heard throughout a large building simultaneously. This was also intriguing, though somewhat scary. The judge has power to condemn to death, and almost does. But he can be pleaded with too, and that's the amazing thing. None of this nit-picking over the minutia of the law. You have to speak for yourself and speak well, and may be interrupted by the person in opposition to you.
The large cast is uniformly good, from the older actors to the children. There isn't a performance out of place here. Camera work, intentionally, isn't always steady - it's right in the middle of all the action at all times, but that unsteadiness is never obtrusive. Catch up on this movie on DVD.

Argo

If you haven't been to see Argo, go and see it.  Ben Affleck's new movie is an accomplished piece, full of suspense, excellent acting (including Affleck himself), a well-told story and a film that has you sitting on the edge of your seat in more than one place.

The opening sequence, in which a mob of Iranians storm the American embassy in Teheran is quite terrifying, and the last half hour or more of the movie is nail-biting as the six 'Canadians' attempt to make it out of the airport.  

Okay, have I said enough to convince you this is worth watching?   When the story isn't in suspense mode, we have some wonderful performances (and great lines) from John Goodman and Alan Arkin as two old-timer Hollywood movie-makers who can turn a turkey in to an eagle but who, in this case want the turkey to remain a turkey.

The movie tells the true story of six American embassy workers who escaped out the back door of the embassy when it was stormed by Iranians angry at the US for harbouring the Shah, a man who was apparently much hated by his people for his opulent behaviour and more.  (At that stage they didn't know they were exchanging one devil for another, in the form of the Ayatollah Khomeini.)   The six men and women managed to find shelter at the Canadian embassy (at this point the Canadians were still okay as far as the Iranians were concerned).  They hid there for nearly three months, while the Yanks back home figured out a way to get them to safety.

Finally a plan to turn them into a Canadian move-making team scouting for locations in Iran was hit upon; ridiculous as it seemed, it was even less ridiculous than some of the other ideas the US Government came up with.  Ben Affleck plays Tony Mendez who was given the job of getting the job of going to Iran and getting the Americans out.  He was the right man: he had contacts in Hollywood who set up a fake production company, and he had the nous and courage to walk into Iran, and persuade the American that this was somehow a good plan.  (Not all of them agreed!)

Affleck shows utter assurance throughout not only in his acting, but even more in his directing, which manages to give background to the story in a few short minutes (much as the first film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy did), enables us to clearly understand what's going on at all times, and presents the story via a huge cast, many of them familiar faces in small roles.  He even manages to give enough personality to the many characters for us not to feel in any way disengaged from them.  This film marks Affleck as a major director: he never eschews story-telling for action sequences (though there are several) and we never think...uh, oh, lots of people running round and lots of guns.  There are lots of guns - a scary number, in fact, many of them in the hands of women - and there are plenty of big crowd scenes, but these are so expertly handled that they never revert to filler.

This is movie-making at its best.  Go see it!

Couple of books

On the train from Firenze to Pisa this morning we met an American woman who’s been living in Italy for many years (she’s married to an Italian). Unlike most of the Americans you meet, the ones who are on tour, she didn’t seem to be out to prove anything. She was just pleasant and down-to-earth. She’s a Christian, and it was partly because I saw her with a piece of paper that had the word Christian on it, and partly because she was reading Henry James’ short stories that we started chatting to her. She said she’d been reading a book called Reading Lolita in Iran, which has a section on Henry James in it, that got her started on reading her old high school copy of the book. Plus she’d recently seen The Others, (with Nicole Kidman), which is in part based on James’ The Turn of the Screw. From my memory of it, I wouldn’t say the film is very close to the book, but certainly it has some aspects of similarity. Reading Lolita in Iran is apparently about a woman teaching English in Iran and she works through various authors in the course of the book, showing the effect they had on the Iranian students. Sounds worth hunting down. I came across a book by awell-known British writer whose name has slipped my mind which is something about the Queen getting into reading (after a library bus stops near where she’s staying). It sounds worth getting hold of too.