{"id":485039,"date":"2026-05-14T22:31:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T22:31:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/485039\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T22:31:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T22:31:11","slug":"parallel-tales-review-isabelle-huppert-in-asghar-farhadi-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/485039\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Parallel Tales’ Review: Isabelle Huppert in Asghar Farhadi Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tCountless exceptional films have been made in which voyeurism \u2014 whether practiced by the protagonist or the audience \u2014 is a significant component. Think Hitchcock\u2019s Rear Window, Polanski\u2019s The Tenant, Haneke\u2019s Cach\u00e9, Coppola\u2019s The Conversation and Powell\u2019s Peeping Tom for starters, or at the more delectably lurid end of the spectrum, De Palma\u2019s Body Double and Dressed to Kill. Asghar Farhadi<\/a>\u2019s elegant but frustrating Parallel Tales (Histoires parall\u00e8les) treats voyeurism as a jumping-off point to reflect on the uneasy relationship between truth and imagination. But the film keeps circling itself, with diminishing traction.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe director and his sibling co-writer Saeed Farhadi loosely based their script on the sixth chapter of the great\u00a0Krzysztof Kie\u015blowski\u2019s 10-part project for Polish television,\u00a0Dekalog, an episode that was expanded to feature length and released theatrically in 1988 as\u00a0A Short Film About Love. Running a fleet 86 minutes, that masterful feat of storytelling observes the love of a withdrawn young Warsaw post office worker for a beautiful, promiscuous woman living in an apartment directly across the street, where he watches her every night through a telescope.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tParallel Tales\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tAn intriguing premise that becomes contorted and dull.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue<\/strong>: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
Cast<\/strong>: Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, Pierre Niney, Adam Bessa, India Hair, Catherine Deneuve
Director<\/strong>: Asghar Farhadi
Screenwriters<\/strong>: Asghar Farhadi, Saeed Farhadi, freely based on\u00a0Dekalog 6
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t2 hours 20 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a film running a lethargic 2 hours 20 minutes, the Farhadis have kept only the set-up and composer\u00a0Zbigniew Preisner\u2019s\u00a0delicate but hauntingly emotional score. However, not even that exquisite music can wring much feeling from this terminally underpowered movie, which plays less like a lived-in, full-bodied story than a bloated metafiction writing class assignment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe director of Oscar winners\u00a0A Separation<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0The Salesman<\/a>, Asghar Farhadi is a world-class artist who put his own distinctive stamp on the grown-up moral melodrama of marital and family conflict.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tHis new film reaches for psychological complexity, but after an intriguing start, it bogs down in fussily over-complicated plotting as it traces the escalating entanglements of crotchety novelist Sylvie (Isabelle Huppert<\/a>), drawing inspiration for her next book by training a telescope on the self-possessed beauty working in a Paris apartment across the street. In her fictional construct, Sylvie names the woman Anna (Virginie Efira<\/a>), after her late mother.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe problem is that all the various strands \u2014 the parallel tales \u2014 dilute our access to the characters, limiting their dimensions. One of the many strengths of the\u00a0Kie\u015blowski\u00a0film is its tight focus on just two individuals, the watcher and the watched, with a couple of secondary characters hovering around the edges. When the voyeur and his subject begin physically to interact, there is low-key suspense, a hint of danger and a fatalistic romantic current fed by their growing mutual curiosity. Before he evolved into the more dream-like poetry of his later successes,\u00a0The\u00a0Double Life\u00a0of\u00a0V\u00e9ronique\u00a0and the\u00a0Three Colours trilogy,\u00a0Dekalog revealed Kie\u015blowski\u00a0to be an impeccable craftsman in the fine art of narrative distillation.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnother two or three drafts of distillation is exactly what the unwieldy\u00a0Parallel Tales\u00a0could have used. Sylvie is set up as the story\u2019s fulcrum, but that role is largely usurped by Adam (Adam Bessa<\/a>), a young homeless man hired by the novelist\u2019s niece\u00a0C\u00e9line\u00a0(India Hair) to help pack up the apartment they co-own, readying it to be sold. Sylvie is as tetchy and aloof with Adam as she is with her niece; her monomaniacal focus on her work has allowed the place to become hopelessly cluttered and filthy, and Sylvie has zero interest in doing anything about it.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe most interesting new element Farhadi introduces is an emphasis on sound, something so often missing for the long-distance voyeur. \u201cAnna\u201d works as an old-fashioned analog foley artist, alongside a handsome young man the author names Christophe (Pierre Niney<\/a>), adding sound effects that range from a squeaky mattress to footsteps in the sand to the gentle flapping of a bird\u2019s wings. The sound engineer at the mixing console is dubbed Pierre (Vincent Cassel<\/a>).\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn Sylvie\u2019s story, Christophe is madly pining for Anna, even though she keeps pushing him away. But she does occasionally give in to the implorations of married Pierre, with whom she appears to have a history. That romantic triangle is about as flavorful as a week-old baguette.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen Adam sneaks a read of Sylvie\u2019s pages, he becomes obsessed with Anna, orchestrating ways to keep running into her and starting conversations. He also starts writing his own version of the story, which inevitably falls into Anna\u2019s hands, and he learns their real names. Efira\u2019s character is Nita, while Cassel and Niney are Nicolas and Th\u00e9o, brothers not immune to sibling rivalry. When Th\u00e9o\/Christophe picks up on Adam\u2019s interest in Nita\/Anna, he reacts with hostility in a terrific altercation scene on a Metro platform.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut mostly, the intertwining threads just sit there, never coming together in any satisfying way or holding up as their own story within the story, despite how hard the writers work at showing that reality can inspire fiction but fiction can also bounce back to influence reality.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tJust to make things even messier and more over-plotted, Sylvie notices a light on for five days straight in an upper-floor apartment, reporting to the cops her concern that the old man who lives there might have died.<\/p>\n

\n\tSure enough, that old man was once the dashing young lover of Sylvie\u2019s mother, and when seeing them together through the window across the street proved too much for her father, he took a suicidal leap off the balcony, in full view of his wife. Her screams still haunt the building according to some, which explains the faint sounds of a distressed woman that Pierre kept picking up on his headset earlier. This would appear to be an extension of Sylvie\u2019s fiction, but by that time, I had well and truly stopped caring.<\/p>\n

\n\tParallel Tales\u00a0has Farhadi\u2019s characteristic polish and DP\u00a0Guillaume Deffontaines, who has worked frequently with Bruno Dumont, lights the interiors beautifully, lending subtle golden tones to the fiction scenes. Naturally, it\u2019s also a big plus to have such an assembly of magnetic actors, with especially solid work from Efira in dual roles. Catherine Deneuve<\/a> turns up for a single scene (barely more than a cameo) to throw some haughtiness back at Huppert, playing Sylvie\u2019s publisher and not at all bothering to hide how bored she is by the outline for the new novel. Girl, I feel you!<\/p>\n

\n\tPlans reportedly are in early development for all ten\u00a0Dekalog\u00a0chapters (shaped around the Ten Commandments) to be remade. Let\u2019s hope the standard improves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Countless exceptional films have been made in which voyeurism \u2014 whether practiced by the protagonist or the audience…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":485040,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[38959,10404,190863,11519,212009,50171,18,117,19,17,32547,327,211985,50494,211830],"class_list":{"0":"post-485039","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-asghar-farhadi","9":"tag-cannes","10":"tag-cannes-2026","11":"tag-cannes-film-festival","12":"tag-cannes-film-festival-reviews","13":"tag-catherine-deneuve","14":"tag-eire","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-ie","17":"tag-ireland","18":"tag-isabelle-huppert","19":"tag-movies","20":"tag-pierre-niney","21":"tag-vincent-cassel","22":"tag-virginie-efira"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116575304804778477","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485039\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}