The Past
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“I Try to Be Unbiased and Just”: A Masterclass with A Separation‘s Asghar Farhadi
In 2009, Asghar Farhadi made ripples around the world when About Elly picked up the Silver Bear at Berlinale. However, it was in 2011 that he truly took the world by storm. A Separation, a touching drama about a couple figuring their way out through a messy but amicable divorce, picked up the Golden Bear at Berlin and more than 60 other awards that year, including an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Having offended the conservative authorities back home, though, meant France became the setting of Farhadi’s latest project, The Past. At last month’s 33rd Istanbul Film Festival, the […]
by Laya Maheshwari on May 27, 2014 -
Asghar Farhadi on The Past, A Separation, and Crafting Earth-Shaking Drama From Small Moments
Every filmmaker is an anthropologist to some degree, but Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (above with The past actress Bérénice Bejo) is a rarity among the studiers. In his two most recent films alone, the Oscar-winning triumph A Separation and this year’s Cannes sensation The Past (which hits theaters today), the 41-year-old has proven himself a master chronicler of human minutiae, weaving the smallest of quotidian details into the grandest of layered, domestic drama. A filmmaker of richly palpable empathy, Farhadi can turn — as seen in A Separation — the pushing of someone out of a door into a life-destroying choice, […]
by R. Kurt Osenlund on Dec 20, 2013 -
Lesbian Lovemaking, Graphic Novels and a Changing China: Parsing the Cannes Awards
Sex sells, but it’s not the kind of thing that wins highbrow prizes—right? The fact that Abdellatif Kechiche’s explicit and entrancing Blue is the Warmest Color (La Vie d’Adèle, chapitre 1 et 2) won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival is a watershed moment, not least of which because its frank depiction of lesbian lovemaking wasn’t an obstacle towards being taken seriously. People may have tweeted their puerile snickering about the randy onscreen romps, but any sober viewer would acknowledge that those relatively brief moments (especially in a 179-minute film) were hardly exploitative — in fact, they […]
by Stephen Garrett on May 27, 2013 -
Cannes 2013: Farhadi’s The Past and Desplechin’s Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian
Given that James Franco’s adaptation of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying will be playing at this year’s Cannes, it seems appropriate to recall one of the novelist’s most famous quotations when thinking about two of the festival’s more memorable films. Reflecting on the conflicts over race and national identity that tore apart the deep south where he lived, Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun, “the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.” This persistence of the past — how it can haunt us in myriad ways — is central to two of the more powerful films at this […]
by Chuck Tryon on May 20, 2013 -
Cannes 2013 Opens with 3-D Glamour, Call Girls & Sci-Fi Animation
This year’s 66th Cannes Film Festival opened with a venerable love fest at the Jury Press Conference on Wednesday. Led by Steven Spielberg, this year’s panel drew an incredible mix of cinema talent Ang Lee, Nicole Kidman and Christoph Waltz, as well as Romanian director Cristian Mungiu and Scotland’s Lynne Ramsay. Spielberg and Lee admitted to the assembled press that they absolutely worshipped each other, despite being pitted up against each other at the Oscars this year. Although Spielberg said he was ready to judge, he claimed, “I look at this as two weeks of celebrating film, not two weeks […]
by Ariston Anderson on May 18, 2013
