Parallel Tales, directed by Asghar Farhadi, received an extraordinary reception at its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival from those viewers who still come to movie theaters with genuine enthusiasm and a desire to discover cinema. This time, Farhadi presents perhaps the most radical and philosophical work of his career, a film that explores the very nature of seeing. It depicts a world in which images must pass through memory, absence, imagination, and perception before they can become reality.
The film opens with a remarkable performance by Isabelle Huppert as a writer whose stories seem to emerge not from everyday life but from cinema itself. She names her fictional characters after people she glimpses through windows, on sidewalks, and in passing moments. It is as though her characters are born through acts of observation before they ever reach the page. She stares at people, reconstructs them in her mind, and then transfers them from the realm of vision onto the blank sheet in her typewriter. Farhadi appears less interested in characters themselves than in the screenplay, and in the process through which observation becomes narrative. The world of the film is born not from streets and people but from a telescope lens and the writer’s memory.
The choice of a telescope is particularly intelligent. Unlike binoculars, which are designed for hunting, entertainment, and casual observation, the telescope is a monocular instrument based on focus and concentration. This single-eyed perspective alters the very quality of looking. With binoculars, both eyes still maintain a natural relationship to the world. The telescope, however, separates vision from ordinary experience and transforms it into a precise, mental, perceptual act. The film seems intent on turning the short distance between two sides of a street into a long journey through imagination and consciousness.
In her solitude and hidden observations of other lives, Isabelle’s character gradually becomes someone who experiences reality not as it exists but as it is reconstructed within her mind. The typewriter, notebooks, windows, and telescope lens all become part of the machinery through which her inner world is created. The people she writes about appear less like real individuals and more like reflections of her parents, friends, and personal memories. As the story unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that the writer is also, consciously or unconsciously, a reflection of the filmmaker himself: an artist who has spent years observing people from a distance, listening to their silences, taking notes, and pinning fragments of life onto the walls of his workspace. Here, the telescope is more than an instrument of observation; it becomes a metaphor for cinema itself, a lens that simultaneously records, distorts, and recreates reality.
At this point the film gradually enters the territory of the gaze. In Parallel Tales, looking is never neutral. Before an image settles in the mind, it passes through memory, desire, loss, and imagination. For that reason, no two people in the film experience the same image in the same way. Everyone rewrites what they see. The film is ultimately less about seeing than about the creation of images within the human mind.
Farhadi also uses color not merely as an aesthetic device but as a component of perception itself. As the film moves closer to the realms of writing, imagination, and cinema, the image becomes increasingly blue and cold. Human beings seem to drift away from tangible reality and into memory and mental reconstruction. By contrast, the world of everyday life is often represented through warmer colors, reds, and vibrant edges, where bodies, touch, and physical reality still possess weight.
One of the film’s most subtle details is the blue nail polish on the index finger moving across the typewriter keys. It is a brief image but a meaningful one, separating the act of writing from the world of reality. The blue color belongs to the same cold, mental universe that dominates the film, a realm where memory, imagination, and perception slowly replace the tangible world.
Even reflections of light become part of the film’s perceptual architecture. One of its most beautiful moments occurs when Isabelle awakens because sunlight reflects from a tin can. By repositioning it, she redirects the beam toward a minimalist painting of blue geometric pyramids on her wall. The image instantly evokes memories of Three Colours: Blue. Yet Farhadi does not stop at a simple visual reference. In the cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski, blue and emotional coldness often traveled through music, silence, and loss. Here, that same emotional quality migrates into the sound studio itself. Sound is created not to reproduce reality but to complete perception.
In Parallel Tales, the image is born in silence before it is heard. The telescope creates a suspended and silent world. Only afterward does the sound studio attempt to supply memory, emotion, and meaning. Words enter the sparkle of human eyes, and love transcends the boundaries of physics and chemistry. The mute universe observed through the telescope is reborn through sound design, while music breathes life into silent images. Farhadi is no longer making a film merely about seeing; he is making a film about the creation of cinematic experience itself: an image born in silence and a sound that arrives later to give it meaning.
The film’s cinematic form and editing are equally remarkable. Unlike many of his earlier works, Farhadi does not rush toward crisis. He follows his characters with patience, distance, and precision. The cuts are fluid and graceful, as though the film moves between layers of perception rather than between scenes.
The presence of a traditional sound studio is particularly meaningful. It is not simply a location but a repository of Farhadi’s cinematic memory. If theater in The Salesman functioned as a metaphor for the reconstruction of life, here the sound studio serves that role for cinema itself. It is a place where sounds are recreated, emotions are performed anew, and reality is reconstructed. One senses that Farhadi has returned to characters, objects, and wounds left unresolved in his previous films.
Throughout the film, images and objects repeatedly evoke memories of his earlier work. It is as though the abandoned red shoes from The Salesman have acquired new life, transformed into blue objects belonging to the world of imagination. Likewise, the silent and aging father from A Separation seems still present in the viewer’s visual memory, lingering beside a blue bathtub through silence, observation, and care.
The violation of privacy, the intrusion into human solitude, and hidden violence remain among Farhadi’s enduring concerns. Even recurring motifs such as construction machinery, bulldozers, and mechanical noises return. The machines that once created an artificial earthquake in The Salesman now appear reflected in restaurant windows, recalling the internal collapse of the characters.
One of the film’s most significant achievements is Farhadi’s return to his own cinematic universe. Yet this return is neither nostalgic nor explanatory. He reconstructs the past through the act of looking. The telescope does not merely bring distant objects closer; it connects the worlds of Farhadi’s previous films. Through its lens, he appears to be observing the memory of his own work: characters, objects, and emotions left unfinished.
The film also returns to one of Farhadi’s central themes: lies. Yet in his cinema, lies are rarely instruments of simple deception. More often, they are attempts to preserve relationships, manage pain, or make reality bearable. In About Elly, A Separation, The Salesman, and even A Hero, truth is constantly rewritten.
In Parallel Tales, violence, betrayal, and suspicion are initially mental and narrative constructs rather than concrete events. What destroys relationships is not the event itself but the image formed around it. Just as Emad’s anger in The Salesman gradually became an obsession with humiliation and revenge, here vision, images, and storytelling slowly erode human bonds.
The brief appearance of Catherine Deneuve as a publisher carries significance beyond mere star casting. She becomes a bridge between Farhadi’s world and the memory of the French New Wave. Her constant demands for rewrites, cuts, and revisions recall the forms of censorship and intervention that artists and writers have long endured.
From this point onward, the film draws closer to the cinema of François Truffaut. Paris is not merely a city but a space for wandering, healing, and being wounded once again. It still seems to carry the memories of love, loneliness, and disappointment that defined New Wave cinema.
The typewriter in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows symbolizes a desire for writing, escape, and self-invention. In Farhadi’s film, the telescope gradually assumes a similar role. For Adam, it becomes not simply a tool of observation but a gateway into the writer’s imagination, where reality and fantasy continually overlap. Bicycles, rain, train stations, and aimless walks through Paris also evoke memories of Truffaut’s cinema. Yet Farhadi does not merely repeat those memories; he merges them with his own world.
At many moments, the film also recalls the work of Wim Wenders, whose cinema transforms looking into an existential search. Wenders’ characters stare at cities, roads, windows, and photographs not merely to see but to understand their place in the world. Parallel Tales enters a similar territory, where images pass through memory and loneliness before they are ever recorded.
Parallel Tales
Ultimately, Parallel Tales is a film about the collision of parallel worlds—worlds that intersect in human memory, perception, and imagination despite the logic of geometry. Its greatest achievement may be that it gradually becomes a metaphor for cinema itself. Cinema, after all, is nothing more than a form of staring: a way of seeing the world again through a lens. What appears on screen is not reality itself but the filmmaker’s perception of reality.
For that reason, the writer at the center of the film can be seen as a reflection of Farhadi himself: an author who creates worlds through observation, selection, omission, and reconstruction. He watches people, listens to sounds, gathers scattered fragments of life, and transforms them into narrative—the very process that has defined his cinema for decades.
Perhaps that is why his latest work feels so personal, philosophical, and radical: a film in which cinema is no longer merely the vehicle of the story, but the story itself.
