Cannes film festival: Iranian auteur Asghar Farhadi returns to France with this intriguing middleweight meta-drama featuring a cameo from Catherine Deneuve
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sghar Farhadi is the Iranian auteur whose film-making style has always shown the high European influences of Antonioni and Haneke. He has in fact made two films in Europe: The Past in France and Everybody Knows in Spain.
Now he returns to France and the French language for this diverting, middleweight meta-drama about betrayal and about a supposed link between voyeurism and creativity: do writers spy on the characters they have brought to life?
It’s a riff or theme-variation on Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Love – with a twist of Hitchcock’s Rear Window – doggedly spinning a spider’s web out of itself. The result is intricate, elaborate, though a little nebulous.
