"You're angry. - No, I'm not. - Yes, you are. - You smoke too much. - What do you mean? - You know what I mean."
Well, you got the point. "The Past" is full of these ticking-bomb situations where any awkward answer is the butterfly's fart before the emotional hurricane. Yet as moody and depressing as the film is, it never really takes off, I guess for the sake of realism, which is acceptable to a certain degree. It's a film where you keep waiting for something to happen, and when it does, well, it's just... m'eh.
Maybe "mess" isn't the right word after all, it's just the kind of labyrinthine plot where everyone's faulty to a certain degree but no one had any bad intentions from the start. From that starting point, AsgharFarhadi tells us that we're all prisoners of the past, even portions we were not responsible for, through the relationships between Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) and Marie (Berenice Bejo), a couple about to finalize a divorce, Marie and her husband- to-be Samir (Tahar Rahim) and the conflicting relationships with the children.
The screenplay is so dense in characters, plots and subplots that the film can be extremely demanding in terms of focus. For instance, I really expected Lucie, the older girl, to be Ahmad's daughter, otherwise why did he have to come to Paris at the worst possible time? Worst is an understatement: Marie is pregnant and Samir's previous wife is comatose after made a suicide attempt, and Lucie holds her mother responsible for that. Naturally, the film manages to keep a balance in terms of faults and responsibilities, and there comes a middle-point in the movie where we're getting closer to the truth and it's fascinating to see how the happiness of four people depend on one person's action.
Yet the film leaves unclear the real question: what really drove the woman to commit her act, but that's not a question Farhadi is eager to answer. This is a movie about relationships driven and undermined by the past, and exploring the way we human beings use secrets and lies as defense mechanisms until they end up backfiring at us. It is the kind of films where good actions are done for bad reasons and vice-versa. And once again after his splendid "A Separation", Farhadi proves that he's a master of multi-layered screen writing and has a unique way to toy with our anticipations and provide one twist after another. But I'm not sure "The Past" is as satisfying an experience as "A Separation".
I have nothing to criticize about the acting, Bejo delivers a remarkable performance and Rahim was actually snubbed by the French César Academy. But I think the film was too ambitious for its own good, and sometimes not enough. Farhadi was said to have spent hours rehearsing imaginary scenes with the actors, involving the way they met or moments that were not featured in the film, he also wrote very detailed back stories to each character, which is a requirement in screen writing, and even more if you write a film about a resurfacing past. The problem is that the actors might be accustomed one another when the film opens, but for us, they're too cold and enigmatic to inspire any enthusiastic immersion into their lives.
We suspect there are nasty and ugly secrets but the whole atmosphere is very bitter and discouraging. Let's just say that the film perfectly unveils the "history" between Ahmad and Marie, but by doing so, we hesitate before playing hide-and-seek with their secrets or feelings. Once we know Ahmad isn't the father of Lucie, it makes harder to believe he'd want to stay in this mess, the whole place is so gloomy and depressing you need to believe there must be something more. By the way, there's also a third girl in the family and she doesn't provide much except to be a playmate for Fouad and an indication that Marie is incapable to maintain a relationship.
Some motives are left unclear and just when you have glimpses of answers, for some reason, Farhadi cheats with his own premise. There's a moment where Ahmad asks Marie why she told him she was pregnant when they were in the divorce court? I wish he also asked her why she kept smoking despite her pregnancy. But Marie asks him to leave. Near the end, he wanted to tell her the real reason why he came, why he insisted to stay, but then she says it's better not to say anything. Granted Farhadidoesn't to make anything formulaic but the closest to a happy ending would have been to show that these people learned the lessons about hiding their feelings. Why wouldn't Marie listen to Ahmad one last time? That's not playing the realistic card, but overplaying it.
Indeed, sometimes, we hide the truth, or distort it (that's how arguments break) but sometimes, we also reveal our secrets or feelings in the most direct and anticlimactic way, reality doesn't wait for the right moment. So it is very ironic that by trying to play the realism to the core, Farhadi enhances the mystery one level too many and actually leaves more questions than answers. At the end of "A Separation", there was only one question left and that was the perfect moment to end.
So I have really mixed feelings, in a way, it's a very solid drama with terrific and realistic acting, even the children were excellent, but it was also a very depressing experience, in an unpleasant way, too many secrets, too much tension and not a proper resolution. Even for people who can't endure art-house European cinema (deemed as boring in many circles), I'd say it's a movie that needed more smiling faces, especially at the end. Life isn't so dark!
