PARALLEL TALES Review

Let us be honest with you. We ended the last film of our third day at Cannes with Parallel Tales, and we are tired, and this film did not especially help. We say this not to be glib about a filmmaker of Farhadi's genuine stature, whose best work ranks among the finest cinema of the last twenty years. We say it because the gap between what this film is and what it could have been, with this cast, with this source material, in competition at this festival, is wide enough to be frustrating. Not catastrophic. Just frustrating, in a particular way, of a talent not finding its footing.

The film is a loose adaptation of Kieslowski's A Short Film About Love, one of the most quietly devastating works in the history of Polish cinema. Kieslowski trusted voyeurism to reveal something true about longing and the terrible intimacy of watching someone who does not know they are being watched. Farhadi takes that premise and builds around it a house of mirrors so self-consciously constructed that, by the time we reach its centre, there is not much to see. Isabelle Huppert plays Sylvie, a reclusive novelist who begins spying on the sound engineers in the post-production studio across the street, inventing stories about their love lives to fuel her new book. The premise has possibilities. The film spends most of its runtime declining to explore them.

It is a rare and mildly uncomfortable achievement to assemble Huppert, Efira, Cassel, and Deneuve and give them collectively so little to work with.

Huppert is given almost nothing to do beyond scowl at her apartment walls and blow smoke in the face of a plot that has limited interest in her inner life. Catherine Deneuve appears as Sylvie's editor long enough to declare the manuscript dogshit and exit. We understood her. Virginie Efira is radiant and underused. Vincent Cassel is perfectly cast as the kind of man everyone assumes is having an affair, which is either a comment on his screen presence or something less flattering, and the film cannot quite decide which.

Into this already crowded vacuum arrives Adam, a homeless man who finds a copy of Sylvie's discarded manuscript and decides to make its fiction real by inserting himself into the lives it describes. The idea has bones. The execution does not quite find the flesh for them. Adam drifts through the film without a past, without a centre, a blank page in search of a character that Farhadi never fully writes for him. The thriller mechanics that should tighten in the second half instead loosen, and the film arrives at its conclusion with considerably less urgency than it departed with.

The one genuinely alive idea is Farhadi's attention to sound, the gap between the silent images seen through a telescope and the noise that actually fills those spaces. It arrives too late and stays too briefly.

The foley artists recreating birdsong and lion claws for a generic nature documentary carry a fleeting, wry poetry, a suggestion that reality is as assembled and piecemeal as the parts of a film. It is the most interesting the movie gets, and it points, just briefly, toward the sharper and stranger film that Parallel Tales might have been in more confident hands or a cleaner draft.

We have loved Farhadi too long to write him off on the basis of one misfire. But this is a misfire, and it stings in proportion to the expectation. Kieslowski made a film about what watching someone can cost you. This one watches its own characters from a safe and disengaged distance and never quite pays the price for it.

🍿 SCORE = 46/100