The Past – Review by Sean Kingston

Dir: Asghar Farhadi

Running time: 130 mins.

Release Date: March 28th

The Past, Director Asghar Farhadi’s follow-up to his 2011 Oscar-winning A Separation, is a dense, multi-layered, but thoroughly engaging melodrama. The film begins with Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) returning to France from Tehran to provide his soon-to-be ex-wife Marie (Bérénice Bejo) with a divorce, allowing her to marry her new partner, Samir (Tahar Rahim), who, with his son, has moved into the home Marie used to share with Ahmad and her own two daughters from a previous relationship. And that’s as simple as things are going to get.

Ahmad, we learn could have provided the divorce from Iran, but has decided to return to France to end his marriage civilly, and say a final and proper goodbye to Marie’s daughters, with whom he has a natural bond, adding to the unease between himself and Samir. Marie’s decision to have Ahmad stay at her home, however, brings a final volatile tension to a household already brimming over with it. Lucie (Pauline Burlet), Marie’s eldest daughter, has been making life difficult for everyone and Marie’s request for Ahmad to intervene sets in motion events that push the film towards its emotionally fraught third act.

The film presents us with characters who want nothing more than to break ties cleanly and neatly with, as the title suggests, their past. But this is easier said than done and recent history haunts the lives of all the key players. Did Samir’s wife, currently in a persistent vegetative state due to a failed suicide attempt, know of his affair with Marie? Is there, as Samir suspects, still an innate attachment between Marie and Ahmad? And what is the real motivation behind Lucie’s manic behaviour? As the film moves into its latter half, all three questions are painfully answered.

History, it seems, must be confronted; decisions and actions accounted for. What lifts The Past above the realms of trite melodrama is the ensemble acting. The three adult performers turn in utterly note-perfect performances; each character feels thoroughly lived in, as though the film has been playing long before we arrived in the theatre. Bérénice Bejo is spectacular as Marie, creating a character we both pity and resent in the same moment. Special mention also, must go to Elyes Aguis, as Samir’s young son, Fouad, who turns in a performance of staggering authenticity, far beyond his fledgling years. Asghar Farhadi’s direction is so assured, his characters so vividly drawn, that watching some scenes feels like an intrusion. Therein lies the mark of a master dramatic director however, his influence is invisible, his camera static and his pace completely unhurried; Farhadi just lets it play out.

The Past isn’t a film that’s going to satisfy its audience, or sate much of their curiosity, but it is going to stick with them long after they have left the theatre. Like the best of its kind, it begs to be discussed, argued and re-examined. It’s not going to pack them in at the multiplexes, but if Captain America isn’t your fare this weekend, you could do a lot worse. It’s not always an easy journey, but The Past deserves to be seen.