Asghar Farhadi is the Iranian auteur whose film-making style has always shown the high European influences of Antonioni and Haneke. He has in fact made two films in Europe: The Past in France and Everybody Knows in Spain.
Now he returns to France and the French language for this diverting, middleweight meta-drama about betrayal and about a supposed link between voyeurism and creativity: do writers spy on the characters they have brought to life?
It’s a riff or theme-variation on Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Love – with a twist of Hitchcock’s Rear Window – doggedly spinning a spider’s web out of itself. The result is intricate, elaborate, though a little nebulous.
Isabelle Huppert is Sylvie, a cantankerous fading writer, living alone in chaotic squalor in her messy Paris apartment, rattling out novels that no one wants to read on her Olivetti electric typewriter. No new-fangled laptops here.
Her latest work is inspired by spying with a telescope on the people in the flat opposite: Nicolas (Vincent Cassel) who runs a sound effects production facility on the premises with Nita (Virginie Efira) and Théo (Pierre Niney); with Nicolas on the digital mixing desk, Nita and Theo fabricate lo-fi noises such as footsteps and rustling undergrowth while the film plays silently in front of them.
Sylvie also constructs an autobiographical story about the fact (or imagined fiction) that her father once used this telescope in this very apartment to spy on her mother’s lover who lived in the apartment next door to that occupied by Nicolas et al. Sylvie imagines that this lover is the old man who has now died there, leaving the apartment empty and vulnerable to furtive entry by those who want to use it for spying.
Fascinated by the intimacy of Nicolas, Théo and Nita – and apparently grasping immediately what they’re doing for a living, not easy, surely, for a luddite typewriter-user – Sylvie has dreamed up for them a steamy tale of furtive sexual passion and murder à trois and we naturally see this parallel drama unfold on screen.
But her agent, played in cameo by Catherine Deneuve, is unimpressed by this and infuriates Sylvie by comparing it to Georges Simenon. (Simenon, incidentally, might have told Asghar Farhadi that his movie did not need to last two hours and 20 minutes.)
But then fate upends Sylvie’s life and sensationally injects a new meaning and relevance into her writing. Her concerned niece (India Hair) hires someone to clean up the flat and this is Adam (Adam Bessa) – an ex-con going straight who impressed her by grabbing her bag back from the pickpocket who had stolen it on the Métro. Adam immediately conceives a dangerous obsession with Sylvia’s new novel and with the people who unknowingly inspired it. He manages to show the manuscript to Nita and so the fiction fatally contaminates real life.
It’s a film that takes its time coming to the suspenseful dramatic point, and I wonder if its prolixity is due to Farhadi looking for something more than high-concept Simenon thrills. But it’s intriguing and acted with conviction, and those sound effects are food for thought: the fake overdubs essential for creating reality.