Do you know how a duck can get into a bottle?
Imagination.
The duck is real, the bottle is real, the duck in the bottle is not.
It is just imagination.
As with all narrative films, imagination is key. Parallel Tales moves seamlessly between the imagined lives of “Anna,” “Pierre,” and “Christophe” and the “reality” of Sylvie (an aging published novelist), her niece Laurence (pregnant from an anonymous donor), Adam (a formerly homeless young man hired by the niece to watch after an initially reluctant Sylvie), and their neighbors working in an apartment across the street – Nicolas (a recording engineer who supervises the creation of sound effects for movies), his brother Theo (assistant sound producer), and Nita (a beautiful young woman who creates appropriate sound effects by unusual means).
Enriching this “actual” setup is Sylvie’s imagination as she spies on the neighbors with a small telescope and creates relationships and complexities for a new novel. She doesn’t even know their real names or anything in reality about their lives other than what she can see through their windows. No sounds escape through their closed windows, so Sylvie relies only on sight for the story she begins to concoct about them. In Sylvie’s tale Nita is called Anna, Nicolas is Pierre, and Theo is Christophe.
To emphasize the connection between reality and imagination, we are provided a closeup of paper in a typewriter as both the film title and the name of Sylvie’s new novel are typed out: Histoires Paralleles. During the first half or so of the film, we observe these parallel stories by continuously moving back and forth between the “reality” of the film’s story and the “fiction” of the novel’s narrative. What one reviewer bitterly and incorrectly derided as “bouncing around” is actually a beautiful choreography of real scenes (as “real” as we allow movies to be) and imagined scenes.
Appropriately Sylvie begins her novel with a young woman – the real Nita transformed into an imagined Anna. The writer/voyeur watches her arrive on a bike before entering the building across the street. She looks like Sylvie’s mother Anna; thus, her fictional name. As she often does, the author draws from her own life, her own memories, to mix with her imagination.
Rather than the way Hollywood films often depicted writers grappling with their new work – typing some words, ripping the paper out of the typewriter, and adding another failure to the growing hailstorm of crumpled paper surrounding the desk – Farhadi simply presents Sylvie at the typewriter or walking around while rereading and changing her word choices. The sound of her voice is reassuring as her sentences continually improve.
She observes Nita/Anna in the top floor apartment with two men, one older, one around the same age as the young woman. Sylvie can guess what the men are doing, for she sees the big screen with a movie playing, the younger man holding a boom with a microphone on it, the older one seated at a table full of equipment. What the young woman is doing must be more mysterious at first.
Both in reality and in her novel the trio is involved in the Foley process of recording sounds, such as footsteps on pavement or legs wading through water, and adding them to film soundtracks. Their job reminds us that cinema relies on the willing suspension of disbelief.
Sylvie’s present reality also serves as fodder for elements in her novel. Cutting her foot on glass in the kitchen and being criticized by her niece for eating out of a can rather than microwaving her food morph into Anna cutting her foot and being chastised by Pierre for using the gas stove rather than the microwave.
Reality also feeds Sylvie’s imagination. By transposing her life events into her fictional character’s life suggests that she identifies with Anna, a younger version of herself. Time is fluid for the writer – events or feelings from the present or past can flow into her created narrative. Writing a novel possibly allows her to “live” again as a younger self.
Anna is not interested in having an affair with Christophe, but she is somewhat reluctantly involved with his older brother Pierre even though he is married. Sylvie may be creating this sexual affair out of her own memories or past wishes.
Farhadi also exchanges art flowing out of life experiences with life imitating art. Sylvie imagines the apartment housekeeper of her novel having a bad back; later, unknown to Sylvie, we discover that the real Nicolas has a bad back. Farhadi intrudes and reverses the sources of creation by playing with elements of the narrative.
Sylvie can become confused by her own creation, as she tells her niece that she didn’t sleep well because of the rain. The niece is puzzled and says that it didn’t rain. The storm was actually in Sylvie’s imagined scenes for her three characters.
The “reality” of the film increasingly mixes with the “fictions” of the novel. But, of course, Bertholt Brecht would remind us that what we are watching is all fiction. Better to leave that aside for the moment.
Just in case viewers are unsure whether they are watching events in the reality of the film or the fiction of the novel, Farhadi usually has the imagined scenes accompanied by the gentle sounds of a guitar, but not always at the beginning of the scene. In fact, it seems that the guitar is often held back longer than usual just to keep us wondering. He also changed camera styles between the real and the fictional.
Certain elements of the novel are unclear until later information provided in the “reality.” At one point in the novel Pierre stops the Foley recording because he hears a woman screaming. That is not explained until we hear Sylvie’s voice-over narration talking about her mother’s extra-marital affair with Franck, a neighbor who lived in the apartment next to the actual Foley recording studio.
For this section of her novel depicted on screen, Sylvie is in the past remembering her father’s response to the mother’s infidelity. He spied on his wife and her paramour with the telescope he had given Sylvie for her 9th birthday. Thus, the telescope has a history of unraveling actual secrets or providing food for the imagination.
With these scenes from the past, now recorded in her novel, we learn the source of the scream which the fictional Pierre claims to have heard. It is the ghostly echo from the past as Sylvie’s mother witnessed her husband’s fatal response to her adultery. Only later do we discover that here truth and fiction have been blended in Sylvie’s narrative.
Once Sylvie realizes that her editor, coolly played by Catherine Deneuve, is not really interested in this new novel, since “people don’t act that way anymore,” she angrily gives the manuscript to Adam who has been following her according to his understanding of his employment by the niece.
Adam is actually intrigued by the story because of his own fantasies about the trio across the street, especially about Nita. He wants to know what Sylvie wrote about her three characters and perhaps “learn” more about the young woman.
In the next portion that he reads, Anna and Pierre are once again indulging in sex. Christophe is spying on them from the balcony next door, belonging to the now empty apartment where the elderly man, Franck, had just died in reality. The actual home of the once-upon-a-time lover of Sylvie’s mother is now serving the momentary needs of the fictional, jealous wannabe lover of Anna.
With life imitating art once more, later in the film Nicolas will step onto that very balcony to spy on Nita and his brother Theo. Farhadi and his co-screenwriter Saeed Farhadi seem to enjoy using their imagination and control of the narrative to create scenes in the film’s “reality” which echo Sylvie’s fiction. The beautiful intricacy and mastery of this narrative film is a joy to behold.
By this point, when we see scenes from the novel, we are witnessing what Adam is reading, not what Anna was imagining as she wrote the novel.
Perhaps we are now in the realm of Roland Barthes’ theory that readers become co-producers of some written works through their own unique interpretation of the words. What each reader brings to a book colors their understanding. Thus, what we see is Adam’s interpretation of Sylvie’s imagination influenced by his own experiences, understanding, and emotions.
Adam finishes reading the novel, whose improbable, actually silly, ending we have seen played out on the screen. From this point on, the second half of the film will no longer mix in scenes from the novel but simply present the “reality” of the lives of Adam, Sylvie, Nita, Nicolas, and Theo. The film is no less interesting, but it is strictly more similar to Farhadi’s previous films which generally follow a chronological sequence of events in a realistic style.
Adam now becomes the peeping Tom, initially because of his infatuation with Nita, which feeds his jealousy of Theo and Nicolas, especially of Nicolas. His confusion of the contents of the novel with reality is almost immediately revealed when he leaves a threatening note under the windshield wipers of Nicolas’s car.
It is not just through the telescope that Adam spies on Nita. Whenever she is in a neighborhood café, he walks around outside casting glances at her. She is not yet tangible but is always behind glass – the windows of the apartment and the café and even the glass lens of the telescope. In Adam’s growing desire she remains more “Anna” than Nita.
As Adam inexplicably begins laboriously copying Sylvie’s typescript into his own handwriting, he has begun the process of direct plagiarism. Despite Farhadi’s denials about purposely adding this element of plagiarism to the film, this is certainly a case of art imitating life or perhaps simply foreseeing the future.
In 2022 a former student of Farhadi claimed that he had stolen the idea for his 2021 Cannes Grand Prix-awarded film A Hero from her 2014 documentary made during the director’s filmmaking workshop in Tehran. An article in Variety (March 13, 2024) states that the Iranian court cleared Farhadi of all charges and issued a statement that after reviewing his film A Hero, the student’s documentary, and hours of video taken in the workshop, the copyright law experts determined that “creating a film or work of art inspired by real events or news is entirely permissible, as real events and their news coverage are part of the public domain, and the right to use them is not monopolized by anyone.”
The verdict also indicated that Farhadi’s film “diverges significantly from not only the documentary but also the real event and its reported news in terms of concept, storytelling, structure, characterization, performance, and all creative elements, thus establishing that no copyright infringement has occurred.”
Regarding the suggestion that he added the theme of plagiarism to PARALLEL TALES, the director suggested in an interview at Cannes, “Maybe it’s an unconscious consequence of what I went through, but as a matter of fact, [this film] project came before that story, so I don’t know if it’s related.”
Why would Adam laboriously copy Sylvie’s novel? The answer is soon revealed as Adam finally “breaks through the glass wall” and sits inside the café where Nita is getting coffee. Striking up a conversation with her, he reveals that he has written a novel.
Naturally, this being France, we are not surprised that she indicates some interest in the “fact” that he is a novelist. Once he learns her name, he asks if he might change the name of his protagonist from “Anna” (Sylvie’s choice) to “Nita” (the only change that Adam will have made to the novel).
As if stealing Sylvie’s written words is not enough, he goes on to her spoken words, what he heard Sylvie tell Maria, the housekeeper – “Humans know they will die, animals do not.” To his credit he adds his own thought, “Writing allows us to forget we are going to die.” Nita is far more utilitarian with her simple explanation for why she keeps a journal, “Writing is so one doesn’t forget.” Despite her stated preference for poetry, she accepts Adam’s offer and agrees to read “his” manuscript.
This will be his eager, but thoughtless mistake.
When next they meet on the street, Nita is chilly towards Adam, “How long have you been watching me?” She tells him to maintain the character’s name as Anna, not Nita. She doesn’t want anyone to think she is like the woman in the novel.
She can’t return the manuscript to him now, for Nicolas has unexpectedly taken it, but she promises to give it back to Adam the following day at the restaurant.
A bit of detective work then enters the film as Nicolas shows Nita that the sign left under his windshield wiper has the same handwriting as the manuscript. She reads it: “Aren’t you ashamed of sleeping with your friend’s girlfriend, you creep?” She realizes that Adam is stalking her and confusing the contents of “his” novel with reality.
Now that words have become so important to Adam – as a way to initially interest Nita in him – he sneakily steals the notebook in which she maintains a kind of journal. He thinks that he can learn more about her through the words about the things she doesn’t want to forget.
When she finally returns his manuscript to Adam, she confronts him and says that none of it is true, that her life, any life for the most part, is just “banal, repetitive.” Adam offers to “change the manuscript to make it more interesting,” but she scoffs and says, “Then it would not be interesting.” Sylvie’s fiction is more interesting than the reality of Nita, Nicolas, and Theo.
As if on cue, Theo’s true feelings for Nita begin to emerge as he reads the manuscript. Sylvie’s imagination has prefigured reality. Fired up by her words (supposedly Adam’s), Theo then acts impulsively, brutishly, and mistakenly toward Nita. In his case, life suffers by imitating art.
In Sylvie’s novel Theo’s fury is directed toward his brother, while in the reality of the film, he attacks Adam in the subway station as Nita waits to go home. He tears up a new collection of pages that Adam has actually written himself and given to Nita. But this attack on Adam and his writing certainly fails in making Theo attractive to Nita as some kind of savior. Quite the contrary, as these assaults drive her out of his life and that of his brother.
On the train Nita pieces the paper fragments together, much like putting bits of film together to create a scene. Adam has finally written his own words, thoughts, and feelings:
Can one become a writer if one has never written a line?
When one has no other talent than that of imagining, of lying, sometimes to take short flights?
When we don’t even know when or where, nor from which mother’s womb were we thrown into the chaos of the world?
In response to his search for the security of a mother’s womb, Adam, now bruised and scratched, returns to Sylvie’s apartment. Without a word she lets him in and takes him into her arms. Sylvie has become the mother.
This new role invigorates Sylvie to remain in the apartment and not to sell, much to her niece’s fury. When Adam overhears the argument, he offers to leave, Sylvie says adamantly, “No,” quite the opposite from her first words to him at the beginning of the film when she told him to stay away from her because he stank.
Intent on leaving the neighborhood, Nita goes to Sylvie’s apartment to retrieve her stolen journal. Once it is in her hands, she hands Adam’s taped note to Sylvie with these parting words – “What he wrote was very beautiful.”
Leaving us with a positive feeling, as Adam tells Sylvie he is going out (not leaving), she shows that she has read the note by telling him, “That is good for a start.” He has received the stamp of approval from a published author, now in some ways his mother, in other ways his editor. Together, who knows what they will create? What is beautiful is that they both now have a reason to live and go on creating.
Parallel Tales is a brilliant film about creativity, both through words and through images, through acting and dialogue, through lighting and framing, through music and sound effects, through all the fascinating components of cinema.
Parallel Tales is Asghar Farhadi’s 10th feature film and his fifth film to compete at Cannes (2026). How it came to be is detailed in Nick Vivarelli’s interview with the director published in Variety (May 20, 2026).
In 2021 an American company offered a proposal for Farhadi to adapt all 10 episodes of the TV series Le décalogue, the Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s loose depiction of Moses’ Ten Commandments updated to the 1990s. Farhadi had started his writing/directing career in Iranian television productions but had no interest in returning to that medium.
His rejection of the proposal was then followed by the suggestion to at least talk with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, who had co-written the screenplays for many of Kieślowski’s films, including Le décalogue. They talked.
Farhadi made it clear that as much as he admired the Polish series, he had no interest in remaking or even adapting any particular one.
“What’s the point of making a remake? I’ve never done anything like that, and if a film is good, if it still has some impact, some value, what’s the point of really making it?”
Fortunately, the conversation with the Polish screenwriter had some impact. “I started talking with my co-writer Saeed Farhadi about how I can make one of these episodes just a shell, a frame into which I would make a story that would be more personal. And finally, I chose “A Short Story About Love,” Episode Six, because that’s the one that had stayed with me most. I didn’t see them again.”
In Kieslowski and Piesiewicz’s two versions of A Short Film About Love (1988 and 1990), a painfully naïve 19-year-old man spies on his beautiful, promiscuous neighbor with a telescope, but turns away whenever she is having sex. Out of a sense of pity mixed with curiosity, the woman eventually allows him into her life, a mistake which leads to his nearly successful suicide.
The Farhadi brothers ignored that story and came up with their own unique way of telling a story about spying on neighbors and falling in love.
“What surfaced was the idea that this boy, who is a peeping Tom, keeps peeping on this woman. And he falls in love with her, just through an image. He has nothing but an image to fantasize about. But what if there was sound? What happens if sound is this kind of character? That’s how we came up with the idea of having the people that our character observes being sound makers, being foley artists. It became our way into the story of reflecting between image, sound, and writing. Another aspect I really liked in “Episode Six” was this character of an older woman. Her solitude. I think that was also the other thread that I followed to bring this new world to the fore.”
Despite Asghar Farhadi’s 100+ international film awards and one Oscar nomination, the American company could not secure financing for this new film to be made in America. In contrast, France welcomed and financed the production of Parallel Tales.
To sum up what he felt was the substance of his fascinating, perfectly acted and directed film, Farhadi stated, “We’re living in the world of narratives, there are plenty of narratives around us, stories that are told to us. We are told what to think, and how to perceive things through the stories that are told, and with the narratives that are created, especially with social media, we’re peeping into everybody’s lives. And then we fantasize about their lives, thinking we have some knowledge.”
Controlling the narrative provides a path to power.
