About Elly of Asghar Farhadi
About Elly is the international title of an Iranian film of 2009, which was successfully presented at the Berlin Festival, which is called original Darbareye Elly. Would be translated "About Elly," and frankly do not see why the Italian distribution has not named (maybe because with a title like that someone might mistake it for a Hollywood comedy). But not too angustiamoci, is already About Elly something has come in Italian cinemas, and later in the film club circuit, more than a year and a half after its first public screening.
The peculiarity of the film is that it does not belong to the iconography of Iranian cinema standard. There is no fact in the film, the fixity of the typical look of that film, there is concern for the disadvantaged classes, there is the constant presence of the nation state to suppress individual freedom. Or rather, there is each of these things, but for once hidden beneath the surface of a work of bourgeois setting, with characters belonging to the wealthy class and involved in a sentimental drama that gradually becomes the chronicle of a disappearance.
Some interpreted this as the narrative structure is a clear homage to a classic Italian The adventure of Michelangelo Antonioni, with the center of the story a group of young people on holiday, with the disappearance of a girl who disrupts the lives of all and radically changed the relationships within the group. The difference is that, where Antonioni threw the very existential, Asghar Farhadi, director of Ahmadinejad in Iran, can not help but be more specific, and talk about the world and the society in which its characters, although not too different from Western, are forced to live.
It is in this way, through the trigger mechanism of a clear narrative (the disappearance of a person), the film shows the merciless portrait of the constraints to which every individual is subjected in a society permeated by the control of the state and religion .
The drama is not is never fully revealed, the identity of the characters involved remains ambiguous, as the resolution of the case: but just the perception of the doubt, the hole in the veil of normality that people are trying to create around himself to undermine an entire world and its values. The vacuum is built on the existence of the protagonists of About Elly is revealed in all its depth when fear makes them naked and in particular hints at the possibility of punishment and repression. It does not happen anything illegal or scandalous in the film, but the same idea that it could happen already enough to create havoc and suffering.
For us western light years away from the subtle, pervasive, and that is even more violent suppression of freedom, it is impossible not to think about the riots and the reactions that followed the presidential election two years ago or more episodes to come Recent Sakineh the process or to imprisonment of the director Jafar Panahi . It is impossible not to think that the protagonists the film, educated, urban and affluent, are not the same protesters who have poured into the streets of Tehran after the announcement of Ahmadinejad. But the film Asghar Farhadi not observe them from afar, as a whole, as a social and political, but up close, one by one, caught in a moment of personal crisis and family says a lot about each of them or the fragile balances (on unseen hypocrisy daily) that support the dominant moral thirty years after the Islamic revolution. Generating, on the story, a tangle of inextricable embarrassment and pain as well be taken for the cultural distance, an almost metaphysical. Even if everything in the film (which never names faith and precepts religious) tells us about history, practicality, a here and now than ever, perhaps the Iranian cinema has shown more explicitly.
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