Two-time Oscar-winning Iranian auteur Asghar Farhadi is back in Cannes for the fifth time with French-language drama “Parallel Tales,” a film he made in exile after leaving Iran in 2022. He had decided not to return following the death of Mahsa Amini and the ensuing protests that prompted the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising which marked the most significant challenge to the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution.
Since then, the director of “A Separation,” “The Salesman” and “A Hero,” became a distant dissident. Until last month, when, after finishing “Tales,” he returned to his beloved, now war-battered, home country before coming to Cannes.
During his exile, Farhadi embarked on “Parallel Tales,” an adaptation of Polish master Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Dekalog: Six” which explores obsession, surveillance, and unrequited love. He initially set the story in the U.S., where his producer Alexandre Mallet-Guy and a U.S. partner were unable to raise the financing. So he transposed to Paris where they rapidly assembled a starry cast comprising Isabelle Huppert, Adam Bessa, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, Pierre Niney and Catherine Deneuve.
“Parallel Tales” – in which Huppert plays a reclusive Parisian novelist who spies on her neighbours, who are foley artists, for creative inspiration, leading to fiction and reality becoming intertwined – launched in Cannes to muted critical response and simultaneously went on release via Memento Films in France where it opened at number one and racked up more than 125,000 admissions and roughly $1.2 million in its first frame, putting its initial result on a par with French takings for “The Past” which wound up being a local hit.
