The strength of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi's filmmaking lies in his ability to turn the viewer into one of the characters in the story he is narrating. I first got a taste of this from his 2011 film ‘A Separation’, which made me feel as though I had a full meal, cooked to perfection. Farhadi’s strong grasp of family dynamics and his impressive depiction of them are unmatched. I can only recall a few American directors who have come close to achieving Farhadi's level of mastery over actors. One fine example is John Cassavetes. Farhadi's About Elly is no exception. The film tells the story of an Iranian family subjected to tremendous pressure.
The film opens with this large middle-class family arriving at a deserted seaside villa to enjoy their vacation. One member of this group is an outsider, a woman named Elly, who we slowly learn was brought along by Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani) with the intention of introducing her to a recently divorced young man, Ahmad. When Elly decides to leave the next day, Sepideh persuades her to stay. Soon after, Elly disappears, and no one has any clue where she has gone. Everyone presumes that she has drowned in the sea while playing with the kids. The search-and-rescue team fails to find her body, and the family's life is turned upside down.
The plot device of a woman disappearing in the middle of a vacation at a seaside location, with no one having any clue as to who she was and where she went, was earlier seen in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura. However, About Elly isn’t a remake. On the contrary, it treads a completely different path, narratively miles apart from the Antonioni film. What Farhadi has concocted here is something that resembles a thrilling police procedural but without the police. Each family member tries to resolve the mystery of Elly, and every question that is asked brings to light new developments that come as a shocking surprise to both the family members and us. Farhadi turns us into an uninvolved silent spectator observing the proceedings in anticipation of uneasy truths.
Most of the blame falls on Sepideh, who is seen as the one who had arranged all this. Tempers flare when it is revealed that Sepideh is as much in the dark about Elly as the rest of them. Her odd behaviour triggers too many questions: Is she hiding something? Is she pretending to not know anything about her? Why did Elly leave behind her bag if she wanted to leave without saying a word? When a major pivotal truth about Elly is revealed, the whole family is faced with perhaps the most complicated episode of their life. Things get so unbearably intense not just for the characters but also for the audience.
Farhadi sets up the opening 30 minutes of the film in a cheerful mood, and what we witness is a group of fun-loving individuals having a joyous time. They sing, they dance, they dine, and they play games. The atmosphere is pleasant, and we feel as if nothing can go wrong. We are completely at ease. When these 30 minutes are over, Farhadi lets us know that the fun has ended; now it's time to start feeling really, really anxious about what is about to transpire in the next 90 minutes. He succeeds in doing this. His ability to generate tension and unfailingly sustain it for the remainder of the film is truly remarkable. And he achieves all this without the use of a background score. There is no spooky music to announce that things are about to get worse. Instead, he relies on the ambient noises like the lashing sea waves, an approaching car, a ball hitting a window pane, or a specific mannerism from any of these characters.
The camera follows these characters, at times staying with them briefly to give us a tangible sense of what each individual is experiencing at that present moment. It helps that Farhadi has assembled such an immensely talented bunch of actors to convincingly play these characters. Their jaw-droppingly authentic performances leave one completely speechless. Golshifteh Farahani as Sepideh is unbelievably natural and comfortable, relaying her character's confusion, guilt, regret and desperate attempts to make things right. Peyman Maadi from A Separation appears as one of the male members of the family. About Elly is a must-watch for aspiring filmmakers, as there is much to be learned about the structuring of its narrative and control of pace.
