I am astonished and fascinated by Asghar Farhadi’s new film, Parallel Tales. It is something genuinely fresh and strikingly different from this great filmmaker, who in his latest work gradually draws the viewer into the trap of an unfamiliar story. At first, it is not clear where you are being led, and you may begin to wonder what could possibly happen in this interwoven world, where the characters and spaces seem to have little or nothing to do with one another. And then, suddenly, Parallel Tales begins to work its magic. You become enchanted by its characters and by spaces that slowly begin to open into one another.
This time, more than ever before, Farhadi allows the viewer to become lost inside his film. But this sense of being lost is not the result of confusion; it is part of his meticulous design. We enter a world in which reality and imagination, life and fiction, observation and intervention are constantly exchanging places, and it is this continuous movement that keeps the film alive. At first we believe we are watching several separate lives, but gradually we realize that every look, every sound, every silence and every seemingly insignificant incident is connected to a thread binding these people together.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the film is that Farhadi is no longer concerned only with truth and lies. He is also exploring a new way of telling stories. He shows us how we construct narratives from incomplete fragments of other people’s lives, how we interpret a glance, draw conclusions from a silence, and combine scattered clues into something that may have very little to do with reality. This impulse has always existed in Farhadi’s cinema, but in Parallel Tales, for perhaps the first time, the process itself becomes one of the central subjects of the film.
At the center of this world is Sylvie, brilliantly played by Isabelle Huppert. She is not merely an observer. She is someone who wants to transform what she sees into a story, and this is precisely where the boundary between observing and interfering begins to disappear. When you watch somebody else’s life and reconstruct it in your imagination, are you still only an observer, or have you already become part of that life? Farhadi never asks the question directly, yet it accompanies us throughout the film.
Huppert is extraordinary in the role because her performance is built upon her gaze, her silences and her complete command of emotion. She is one of those rare actors who does not need shouting, tears or exaggerated gestures to generate tension. A look is enough for us to understand that her mind is constructing an entire world. This restraint allows Sylvie to seem fascinating, dangerous, curious and, at times, even cruel.
The presence of Vincent Cassel, Virginie Efira, Pierre Niney and Adam Bessa, meanwhile, prevents the film from remaining entirely inside Sylvie’s imagination. Each of these characters possesses a world larger than the one Sylvie imagines for them, and Farhadi makes precise use of the distance between what these people really are and what others believe them to be in order to complicate the game between reality and imagination. Like Sylvie, we begin to think we understand these people, but the film repeatedly reminds us that knowing another human being is far more difficult than we imagine.
Formally, Parallel Tales is also markedly different from many of Farhadi’s earlier films. He moves more freely here, gives music a much greater presence, allows more humor into the film and lets certain scenes breathe. In a film such as A Separation, events unfolded with an almost relentless dramatic pressure. Here, Farhadi creates more room for imagination, pauses and playfulness with cinematic form.
This change may surprise some longtime admirers of his work, but for me this very boldness is one of the film’s greatest strengths. Farhadi could have spent years producing new variations on the brilliant dramatic architecture of A Separation and continued to receive admiration for them. Instead, he has chosen to move away from the territory in which he had already achieved mastery and enter a different world. For a filmmaker of his stature, that requires courage.
Even the use of music signals this transformation. For years Farhadi was remarkably cautious about employing music. He has spoken himself about using it sparingly, often reserving it for closing credits rather than allowing it to dictate the emotional response to dramatic scenes. In Parallel Tales, however, music becomes a more visible part of the film’s emotional world and has a direct presence in many scenes. This not only changes the film formally but gives it an atmosphere that we have rarely encountered before in Farhadi’s cinema.
Yet what takes the film beyond being merely a formal experiment for me is the profound loneliness of its characters. Behind all these games of imagination and interlocking stories are people who desperately want to be understood while remaining incapable of fully understanding one another. Every character constructs an image of somebody else and gradually begins to substitute that image for reality. Perhaps one of the film’s most painful observations is that, instead of truly knowing people, we often love—or fear—the versions of them that we ourselves have created.
Once again, Farhadi shows how dangerous judgment can become. A single missing piece of information can completely alter our understanding of a relationship or a person. This is one of the familiar qualities of his cinema, but in his new film the idea exists not only within the story; it has entered the very mechanism through which the story is told.
For me, one of the film’s great pleasures is that the further it progresses, the less certain we become about exactly what we should believe. Is what we are seeing real? Is part of it Sylvie’s imagination? Are these characters really the people they appear to be, or are they the people created in the minds of others? Farhadi places these questions in the viewer’s mind without offering definitive answers, and that is why the film continues to unfold inside us even after it has ended.
Parallel Tales is a film about looking, about creating stories, and about the impossibility of knowing another person solely through what we have seen. Human beings are always larger than what can be contained within a frame, a glance or a story.
That is why, for me, this is not simply another new film by Asghar Farhadi. It represents a new stage in his cinema. A filmmaker who has spent years exploring truth, lies, morality and judgment has now made the very mechanism of storytelling itself part of his subject. He asks us to consider how stories do not merely reflect reality; sometimes they participate in creating it.
I consider Parallel Tales one of Farhadi’s boldest and most accomplished films, a work that demonstrates that he is still unwilling to settle comfortably into the achievements of his past. He continues to search for new ways of telling stories, and for me that is the greatest achievement of this new film: after all these years, Asghar Farhadi can still surprise us.
