NOTE: This is a reprint of my review from the Virginia Film Festival.
As far as striking visual metaphors go, Asghar Farhadi chooses an apt one to begin The Past, his stirring, complicated follow-up to Oscar winner A Separation. The film begins with Marie (Berenice Bejo) speaking to her husband Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) through a thick layer of glass at the airport. It's impossible to hear what the other is saying without it being muddled because of the large obstruction between them. The film, which took home some gold at Cannes earlier this year, is about how secrets can prevent us from communicating with the ones we love, and prevent us from moving forward.
When the Iranian-born Ahmad arrives in Paris it appears to be for a happy cause. We know he's been gone for months, and Marie seems pleased he's arrived. But slowly over the course of a drive home we sense a tension between them. We learn he's skipped out on other chances to be there, and Marie talks vaguely about her kids; eldest daughter Lucie (Pauline Burlet) and youngest, Lea, both from a man she met before knowing Ahmad. Ahmad's not really there for a pleasurable reunion, he's there to grant Marie the divorce she's been seeking from him for four years. What she keeps from him, and seems to want him to discover on his own, is that she's living with another man, Samir (Tahar Rahim), and his young son Fouad.
A complicated enough mess on its own, but it only becomes more entangled when Marie reveals her wishes of marrying Samir. Lucie is rebelling constantly, fighting with her mother and staying out late, while shunning Samir at every turn. Fouad is also having a hard time coping with living in another home while his mother is in a coma after a suicide attempt. Samir is stuck between moving on with Marie and longing for his wife, while Ahmad's arrival adds a natural tension into the mix. Are there old feelings remaining between the former lovers?
There are enough complex, layered relationships to fill a handful of movies, and the delicate manner with which Farhadi juggles them is truly extraordinary. Farhadi, who also wrote the screenplay, constantly reveals new wrinkles that either complicate matters further or shed new light on a situation we think is pretty cut 'n dried. We learn that Marie has had three serious relationships in only a few years, which lower her daughters' expectations for Samir. And there are indeed some unresolved issues between Marie and Ahmad, but mostly he finds himself in the position of moderator and peacekeeper in a household that seems ready to explode at any moment. Farhadi keeps any judgement of these characters at a distance, a wise choice considering our perceptions of them will change with each new revelation.
Farhadi gets a ton of support by a cast who navigate the difficult material with pitch perfect accuracy. Its unusual to say that an Oscar nominee (she was nominated for The Artist) needs to prove something to her critics, but it's absolutely true. Winning the award for a silent film is one thing, but taking on a thorny, unsympathetic role such as this is something entirely different, and it doesn't help that it was initially written for Marion Cotillard to play. But Bejo proves she's got the goods, stripping away the elegance and revealing a cruder side we've never seen. Rahim's character is the quietest of all and thus the hardest to decipher, but he really shines in unexpected ways towards the end of the film. It's Mosaffa as Ahmad who has the most complicated role of all as he must interact with literally every character, all of whom perceive him in very different ways. It forces him to switch up emotions on a dime, all of it fueled by an impassioned need to maintain what fragile bond he holds with each of them. Brulet, who looks like she could play Cotillard in a biopic some day, also makes the best out of a role that becomes more than just the typical angry teenager.
If there's an issue it's that Farhadi labors to wrap up every storyline too neatly, and with a film that has numerous little character arcs going at once it gets messy and overlong. Farhadi does leave one major issue mostly unresolved, but this is a film that probably could have used with a bit more ambiguity. It's not the sort of story that demands every question be answered. Still, this doesn't ruin all of the good work that Farhadi and his tremendous cast have done. The Past is a mature, intricately crafted human drama about removing the self-imposed obstacles to our own happiness.
