The Past

Asghar Farhadi’s The Past is powerful and perfect.

In the last scene the comatose Celine shows her first signs of consciousness. Her husband Samir’s cologne sends a tear down her cheek and she squeezes his thumb; a freeze frame confirms the grip.The image signifies the grip that the past holds on us, however we try to put it behind and move on. We don’t know whether Celine will or will not recover, but those two signs of life will keep Samir from marrying his pregnant Marie and will extend his little son Fouad’s trauma. Her signs of life will paralyze Samir, Marie and their unborn child. 

In the first scene Marie seems bright, beautiful, lively, as she meets Ahmad at the airport. We think they’re lovers, but he’s her husband who’s returning from Tehran after four years, at her request to finalize their divorce. Their first exchange is telling because they speak through a glass partition without hearing each other. In several key scenes we don’t hear what the characters say. Often the characters don’t really hear what the other means. 

Here the past impedes understanding. The film exposes Marie as anything but poised and secure. She has not resolved Ahmad’s abandonment of her or her seething daughter Lucie’s anger about Samir. Even when Marie prepares to forgive Lucie for giving Celine Lucie’s and Samir’s love-letters she explodes in anger, driving her beloved daughter away.

As Lucie notes, Marie is attracted to Samir because he looks like Ahmad. She’s divorcing her foreign husband to marry his foreign lookalike. Ahmad fled four years ago in a brutal depression. He’s back now sensible, very sensitive in how he negotiates his way with Marie and Samir and in how he counsels Fouad and Lucie. For his part Samir begins as a nebbish — who tears up from his allergy to the paint he’s using for Marie’s flat — but grows more solid as he tries to stabilize his relationship with Marie and Lucie, keep Fouad level, and finally give Celine one last chance to show she’s still alive. The rhyming tears of Samir and Celine suggests their continuing bond.

The film ripples with telling detail. Fouad is disappointed when Ahmad gives him colouring pencils instead of a helicopter. Later we see him quite engrossed in his drawing with those pencils at his father’s dry-cleaning business. Later we see him playing with a helicopter, though we don’t know which “parent” provided it. Fouad instinctively makes do with what he gets. He seems to recover from Marie’s punishment for a tantrum and he struggles through the confusion of his mother’s death-in-life. Though the older daughter Lucie’s psychological torment is the most graphic, in the scenes involving the two younger children we see them living what will prove their traumatizing past down the road. 

The children’s scenes often parallel the adults. Both generations throw tantrums, make messes, divulge painful secrets, have to apologize, act with destructive irresponsibility and hope for forgiveness. That’s because even adults are so helplessly propelled by their unaccommodated pasts that they remain as helpless and vulnerable as children. While we can understand these driven adults, they can’t be as readily forgiven their irresponsibility as their children can. 

The traumatic power of the past picks up a political resonance through the illegal immigrant Naima. Samir fires her for having enabled Lucie to send Celine the love letters. Without papers, she feels vulnerable in her job, in her own way connected to an unaccommodated past. She acts to counter Celine’s anger at Samir’s supporting Naima not her in a customer’s complaint. We don’t know whether Celine read the letters, whether her suicide attempt was prompted by them or by her humiliation in front of the customer. Here too the past remains an unclear force that can’t be simply explained but that must somehow be dealt with. Not handling the past properly dooms her future.  As the doctor remarks, "In this situation every certainty is a doubtful."