Iranian director Asghar Farhadi established himself as a major director with A Separation, The Past and The Salesman. Each film played an intense drama against the unfamiliar Iranian social backdrop. They forged international sympathies across our borders of political differences and fears.
With Everybody Knows Farhadi takes a quantum leap forward. He wrote and directed what’s probably the best Spanish film of the year. With an all-Spanish cast, script, music and culture this gripping thriller incidentally erases differences of nationality. Instead its theme is brooding suspicions and resentments, the persistence of tribalism even in contemporary society. Families remain locked in class, social and economic divisions, perched to erupt into crime and suspicion. That atmosphere -- and the finely nuanced grasp of Spanish life -- make this film unbelievably believable.
Perhaps because that tribalism bridges the two cultures Farhadi feels natural there. He singlehandedly validates that bogey, cultural appropriation. This is not appropriation but an alien culture lived as one’s own because it is so much like one’s own. That most local of identifications proves global.
When a 16-year-old Buenos Aires girl, Irene, is kidnapped from her aunt’s wedding outside Madrid, a pinwheel of dreads, suspicions and seething anger erupts in the family. With her father Alejandro back in Spain, her mother Laura reunites decorously with old flame Paco, who joins, then leads, the family’s attempt to save Irene.
At the heart of the kidnapping and its resolution is a paternity secret that Everybody Knows. I will say no more. As the family try to recover the girl several members feel suspected of abetting the well-organized abduction. In most mysteries suspicions arise from clues, but here they come from decades-old resentments. Suspicion breeds in the atmosphere. The drunk old sire’s rantings are their embarrassing expression.
Laura’s family resented her love affair with Paco because he was a servant’s son. When Laura needed money for Alejandro, Paco gave her all he had for her lands, which he and new wife Bea spent seven years turning into prime vineyards. Laura’s family still feel they were robbed, both in that land sale and in her father’s gambling losses. In a small town decades-old resentments burn like last night’s.
The opening shot reveals the internal mechanism of the old church belfry clock. That’s a metaphor for the plot. As time unwinds the cogs of family relationships and secrets inexorably work themselves into a public peal. Apart from its regular operation, it disturbs the order and peace of a wedding service. The orderly progression of time and life is always open to an irregular eruption. As Paco puts it, “It's time that gives character, from personality to wine.”
The opening scenes may feel confusing and opaque because we’re plunged pell mell into an extended family reunion, where we don’t know anyone, or their links. This film cries out to be seen again, if only for the ironies there embedded. One line springs to mind. Paco tells Laura “Every time I see you, you have a different child.” “What makes you think this is Alejandro’s?” she asks. At that point none of us knows anything.
And at the end? This is the saddest happy ending in a long while. The exuberant young spirit has been broken. Two marriages have cracked, probably broken. The mystery has been solved but without justice. Another generation of lies, secrets and threat has begun to erode the extended family's ties.
Whether as a thriller, an anatomy of family relationships across economic and cultural minefields or as a director of one national culture totally absorbing and expressing another, this is an astonishing achievement.
And at the end? This is the saddest happy ending in a long while. The exuberant young spirit has been broken. Two marriages have cracked, probably broken. The mystery has been solved but without justice. Another generation of lies, secrets and threat has begun to erode the extended family's ties.
Whether as a thriller, an anatomy of family relationships across economic and cultural minefields or as a director of one national culture totally absorbing and expressing another, this is an astonishing achievement.
