{"id":584432,"date":"2026-05-14T23:13:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T23:13:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/584432\/"},"modified":"2026-05-14T23:13:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T23:13:14","slug":"parallel-tales-review-asghar-farhadis-muddled-voyeuristic-head-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/584432\/","title":{"rendered":"Parallel Tales Review: Asghar Farhadi’s Muddled Voyeuristic Head Game"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSylvie (Isabelle Huppert<\/a>), the pivotal figure in Asghar Farhadi<\/a>\u2019s \u201cParallel Tales<\/a>,\u201d is a French novelist whose better days are behind her. She lives in a stately old Paris apartment that\u2019s starting to fray at the seams, and her whole vibe is that of an analog crank. When she goes into writing mode, she lights up a cigarette, puts on her stodgy spectacles and sits down at her ancient Olivetti electric typewriter, which is clearly the same machine she\u2019s been using for decades.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs she starts the writing process, she pecks at the typewriter a few letters at a time. It\u2019s doubtful, however, that a veteran writer would sound like that \u2014 instead, the keys would be flying. It\u2019s a minor but telling detail, since Farhadi is generally a stickler for authenticity. But in \u201cParallel Tales,\u201d Isabelle Huppert, putting on overdone grouchy airs, seems to be playing less a real-world novelist than a stylized cornball-movie version of a Venerable French Author. The character seems not so much drawn from experience as plucked from a vat of pulp clich\u00e9. And that\u2019s mostly true of the rest of the movie as well.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cParallel Tales\u201d is a very different sort of Farhadi film. It\u2019s not the first project the fabled Iranian director has shot in France \u2014 that would be \u201cThe Past\u201d (2013), which he made on the heels of his international breakthrough with \u201cA Separation.\u201d But though he had already begun the painful process of parting ways with Iran (in 2024, Farhadi vowed not to shoot another movie there until the ban against depicting women without headscarves was lifted), \u201cThe Past\u201d was every inch a Farhadi film. It had his domestic psychodramatic intensity, and his flowing ingenuity.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe new movie, by contrast, is an inflated meditation on fiction and reality. It\u2019s all about people spying on each other, which can be a good jumping-off point for a movie. And no one is saying that Farhadi has to stick to his familiar, starkly artful mode of neorealist drama. But \u201cParallel Tales,\u201d it\u2019s my grim duty to report, is a meandering and rather amorphous mess. It\u2019s a far-out parable of voyeurism and imagination, loosely based on the sixth episode of Krzysztof Kie\u015blowki\u2019s \u201cDekalog<\/a>,\u201d which was about a young man spying on a woman across the street and falling in love with her. But \u201cDekalog: Six\u201d had suspense; \u201cParallel Tales\u201d has longueurs.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Sylvie starts peering through her small telescope at the fifth-floor apartment directly across from her, what takes place behind those windows is not what we expect. The place is a sound-effects recording studio, with three sound designers creating and dubbing aural effects \u2014 footsteps on a sandy beach, flapping bird wings \u2014 onto pieces of film footage. But the three are also involved in a love triangle: the curly-brown-haired Anna (Virginie Efira), who is romantic partners with the older head of production (Vincent Cassel<\/a>), is seeing her younger co-worker (Pierre Niney) on the sly. We watch this and think: Okay, so what? But it turns out that the triangle we\u2019re observing is already Sylvie\u2019s fictionalized version of what she saw through the telescope.<\/p>\n

\n\tSince Sylvie hasn\u2019t exactly been taking good care of herself, her niece, C\u00e9line (India Hair), who owns half the apartment, sets her up with a young drifter, Adam (Adam Bessa), who rescued C\u00e9line from a subway pickpocket. The doleful, scruffy Adam cleans the apartment (though he also shepherds a family of mice),\u00a0and he then takes Sylvie\u2019s abandoned manuscript \u2014\u00a0the fictional scenario we\u2019ve been watching \u2014 and palms it off as his own. He gives it to a woman named Nita (also played by Virginie Efira, now blonde), who he meets at a coffeeshop. He wants her to read the manuscript, even as the film now segues into showing us the real version of what\u2019s been going on in that apartment. (It\u2019s less racy, though it still involves a lurch toward adultery.) Are we having brain spasms yet?<\/p>\n

\n\tThe most baffling dimension of \u201cParallel Tales\u201d is how little life there is to the characters outside of these fiction-vs.-reality gambits. It\u2019s not that the actors are bad. Vincent Cassel invests Pierre with a no-longer-young sense of regret, and Virginie Efira, in her double role, makes you feel the sharpness of Nita\u2019s pain in contrast to Anna\u2019s more libertine \u2018tude. Yet none of this comes to much. When Nita rebuffs the advances of the lightweight cad Christophe (who\u2019s Pierre\u2019s brother), that\u2019s the one focused emotion in the movie \u2014 a woman rejecting workplace harassment. No problem there, but it feels like a different film.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn an abstract way, Farhadi is looking back to films like \u201cRear Window\u201d and \u201cBlow-Up\u201d and \u201cThe Conversation,\u201d as well as De Palma\u2019s \u201cBlow Out\u201d and \u201cBody Double.\u201d But those movies, in different ways, were about trickery and deceit, about drawing the audience into a head game of perception. (\u201cBlow-Up,\u201d 60 years ago, was one of the movies that made art cinema fun, while \u201cBody Double,\u201d preposterous as it is, is vintage guilty-pleasure De Palma.) In \u201cParallel Tales,\u201d Farhadi doesn\u2019t play the audience so much as stymie it with the obliqueness of his storytelling. The movie manages to be rigorously muddled despite not being all that complicated. Maybe that\u2019s because the tales it tells are parallel, all right. It feels like they\u2019re competing to underwhelm you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sylvie (Isabelle Huppert), the pivotal figure in Asghar Farhadi\u2019s \u201cParallel Tales,\u201d is a French novelist whose better days…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":584433,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[199696,199697,96,45217,2839,199698,56,54,55,199699],"class_list":["post-584432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-asghar-farhadi","tag-dekalog","tag-entertainment","tag-isabelle-huppert","tag-movies","tag-parallel-tales","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-vincent-cassel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=584432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584432\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/584433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=584432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=584432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=584432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}