PLOT: An author (Isabelle Huppert) using her neighbours as inspiration while writing her latest novel hires a young man (Adam Bessa) to be her assistant, with him quickly becoming way too absorbed in the seedy tale of adultery she’s weaving.
REVIEW: At one point in Parallel Tales, Isabelle Huppert’s author character, Sylvie, is chastised by her publisher (played by none other than Catherine Deneuve) for making her work too melodramatic and old-fashioned. She could have been talking about the movie she’s actually in, with director Asghar Farhadi’s latest mostly poorly received here at Cannes. Inspired by Krzysztof Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Love, this is a leaden, nearly two-and-a-half-hour French melodrama that doesn’t compare to Farhadi’s far more accomplished Iranian work.
The convoluted storyline follows Huppert’s character as she imagines her neighbours, a trio of foley artists (Vincent Cassel, Pierre Niney and Virginie Efira), are caught up in some kind of romantic entanglement, with the vampish Nita (Efira) cheating on her partner Theo (Pierre Niney) with the older, slick, married Nicolas (Vincent Cassel). In reality, Nita is far from a vamp and in a committed relationship with the unmarried Nicolas, with Theo his brother, who is the one who’s actually married. It becomes complicated when Sylvie hires a homeless ex-con, Adam Bessa’s Adam, to be her assistant, with him so naive he begins to think her story is real, as he spies on Nita, with whom he becomes infatuated.
It’s all quite convoluted and surprisingly dull, despite the participation of some of the best actors in France. Huppert, in particular, is wasted as an incredibly crotchety, reclusive author who, despite being the one who incites all the drama, barely figures into the plot as it gets going. Efira probably makes the biggest impression, with her playing Nita as both a man-eating seductress in Sylvie’s fiction, while in reality she’s just a regular gal trying to get by. Cassel also departs from his usual typecasting — to some extent. In the fantasy sequences he’s very much in the cold Cassel mode, while in the reality-based sequences he’s aging, hampered by a bad back, and stunningly non-confrontational, even when it’s deserved. Pierre Niney — who is huge in France thanks to his version of The Count of Monte Cristo — is wasted as first the cuckold, and then a more aggressive sort thanks to the machinations of the naive Adam, who is supposed to perhaps come off as innocent but rather seems like a creep.
Farhadi both wrote and directed the film, but it feels very much stuck in another era of French moviemaking, perhaps going back as far as the sixties and seventies, with it a story of man’s paranoia and jealousy. It’s the kind of film that spends a large chunk of time taking place in cafes and — were you to add some chain-smoking — it would be the French movie stereotype. It’s certainly nowhere near as incendiary as the Kieślowski film it riffs on, which holds up nearly forty years later. By contrast, this has whiskers on it.
One other thing that gnawed at me is how bad Sylvie’s book seems to be, with her supposedly a famous author, but the story she’s telling is so leaden it feels like the work of an amateur. Ditto the movie Cassel and his crew are labouring over doing sound for, with it seemingly like an endless loop of generic wildlife shots, the kind used as screensavers when your Apple TV or computer goes into sleep mode.
It’s a shame because Farhadi has made some great films, with A Separation being masterful. He seems totally out of his element with this old-fashioned, dull melodrama, with it feeling like the kind of work that will simply wind up as a footnote in his filmography.