"The Past" (2013)

It's something of a small miracle to see a film where not a single character is in the wrong. Typically we're led to root against somebody, or at least identify primarily with one character. To watch a film with a large ensemble that asks us to understand all of its characters perspectives is rare (Perhaps because it is much more difficult than it sounds to appropriately and believably craft this kind of drama). Writer-director Asghar Farhadi's breakthrough A Separation did just this. It told a story of people stuck inside their opinions and point of views, and hurting one another due to their limitations and short sightedness. A Separation is a consistently engrossing family drama that edges on melodrama but earns its sense of high emotions through careful plotting and pacing. No one intends for anyone to get hurt but then human nature gets in the way and basic facts of life make it impossible for a neat outcome. Farhadi's follow up, The Past, raises the stakes of the drama while losing none of the emotional acuity and deft plotting. At the center of A Separation was a story that in the wrong hands could have felt like it was playing with our emotions: a soon to be divorced couple paired with the accidental miscarriage of their new housekeeper's baby leads to a series of devastating misunderstandings. The Past keeps the expiring marriage but puts a comatose woman into the picture almost as an ante-raising move. It also moves the setting from Iran to France, but keeps the film trained on the experience of Iraqis by keying in on Iranian immigrants. While The Past lacks some of the immediacy and groundedness of A Separation, it's every bit its companion piece. Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) left France and his estranged wife Marie (Berenice Bejo) four years ago, but returns from his stay in Iraq when she asks for him to finalize a long in the making divorce. Ahmad has conveniently dropped back in the middle of a complicated time. The Past thrives off of what people say and what they do not say. What people don't say is for well intended reasons but ends up causing more harm than good. Some of these unspoken things turn into some stirring yet completely plausible twists. Marie has hidden the information of a new boyfriend, Samir (Tahar Rahim), from her soon to be ex, and her boyfriend, among many other complications, has a wife clinging to life in coma after an attempted to suicide. Marie also has two daughters from another marriage (one of three she has had). The oldest of these, Lucie (Pauline Burlet), is troubled by her mom's new relationship, for reasons that, like all the tension, are revealed in time, and are heartbreaking but also completely make sense. "There's always room for doubt in these situations," a doctor tells Samir late in the film, and he might as well be describing Farhadi's films. We're never entirely sure who is right in any of the many fights and arguments in the film, and the characters wonder whether they should have revealed the secrets they long kept buried, or whether things would be any better off if they hadn't. We also never learn everything about the past of these characters where so much of the film's issues and conflicts derive from. Ahmad attempts to reveal one more piece of information about the past to Marie towards film's end, and she outright refuses to hear; she's had enough unloading -- and so have we.

Grade: ★★★★