MOVIE REVIEW: ‘The Past’ (Le passé)

Film: The Past (Le passé)
Directed By: Asghar Farhadi
Starring: Bérénice Bejo, Tahar Rahim

Writer/director Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation won the 2012 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and his follow-up, The Past, once again earned Iran’s official submission for this year’s award. The Past didn’t make Oscar’s top 5, but that really says nothing about the film’s quality. Hell, the Academy’s taste in foreign cinema has always confused me anyway.

The Past is a family-based drama that has all the bite of a twisty-turny thriller. It pulls your emotions in a number of different directions, but you never feel as if you’re being manipulated or cheated because all the big “reveals” come as a natural correspondence between the characters.

The film opens with an Iranian man named Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) returning to France to attend a divorce trial with his soon-to-be ex-wife Marie (The Artist‘s Bérénice Bejo). Marie’s new squeeze, Samir, is played by Tahar Rahim, who was so good in 2009’s A Prophet.

Add in Marie’s teenage daughter Lucie (Pauline Burlet) and you’ve got four very volatile, yet mostly reasonable personalities, simmering away in a pressure cooker. Marie wasn’t convinced Ahmad was actually going to follow through on his visit, so she didn’t book him a hotel. So here he is, sharing a bunk bed with the 5-year-old son of his ex’s new hubby. It’s an uncomfortable situation, and you get the sense that even the young children can feel the tension in the air.

Ahmad begins taking responsibility for trying to figure out why Lucie has been acting out of late. Naturally, she’s upset about the high turnover rate of men who come into her mother’s life and leave after a few years, so she often stays out late without offering any update to her worried mother. She’s likely also confused, just as the audience is, why Ahmad came all this way just to attend a divorce hearing when he could have easily just sent a lawyer. Either way, Lucie seems to have a level of comfort with Ahmad that she has no desire of attaining with Samir.

There is also the issue of Samir’s wife. She has been in a coma for months and we’re not exactly sure what happened, but Lucie seems to hold the key to this mystery as well.

Perhaps the film’s title comes from the way the film’s characters (people in general, really) continue to look to the past for answers when they encounter any sort of crisis. We find it so difficult to look forward without reflecting on what went wrong and who is truly to blame. And in most cases, we blame ourselves, preferring to carry the weight on our own shoulders rather than watch our loved ones take the responsibility, right or wrong. Or perhaps it just makes these things easier to accept.

And the further we become removed from the past, the more the details become blurred and the more we’re able to fill in these blanks with our own interpretations, wondering what we could have done differently to change certain outcomes.

Farhadi showed with A Separation that he has a rare understanding of the human psyche and relationships, which is further cemented here. And while The Past might not always be easy to watch, there’s a joy to be found in the respect with which he presents these characters and knowing the deepest bonds will prevail despite what has happened in, well, the past.

Grade: A

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