Asghar Farhadi’s ‘Everybody Knows’ Starring Javier Bardem & Penelope Cruz [Cannes Review]

Early on in Asghar Farhadi‘s “Everybody Knows,” the film chosen to open the 71st edition of the Cannes Film Festival, there’s a quick succession of shots that give us a brief burr of neo-realism. Laura (Penélope Cruz) has flown from Argentina to her small Spanish hometown for the wedding of her sister, with pretty, wild teenage daughter Irene (Carla Campra) and curly-headed young son in tow. Husband Alejandro (Ricardo Darín) stays home because, she tells her parents, “something came up at work.” Amid the reunion hugs and greeting kisses that ensue in this picturesque, vineyard-surrounded village, there suddenly comes a volley of shots of the watching townspeople, and it causes a brief shiver, like a cloud passing over the sun. Old ladies shoot shrewd glances from window sills, loitering men with cragged faces unsmilingly assess the chatter and gaiety of the unfeasibly photogenic family party. It’s memorable because of those faces, but also because it’s a jolt of reality — something that happens only rarely for the rest of the film’s overlong runtime.

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The lively, expansive beginning carries through to the wedding ceremony which is also attended by local viticulturist and family friend Paco (Javier Bardem) and his wife Béa (an excellent Bárbara Lennie, on a roll after her terrific turn in Berlin breakout “Sunday’s Illness“). One of the things that everybody knows around here is that Paco and Laura were lovers for a long while before she left for Argentina and married Alejandro. Their intertwined initials, carved into the wall of the bell tower whose cogs and wheels provide an all too accurate metaphor for the mechanistic way the plot will grind forward, are discovered by Irene and a smitten local boy as they sneak off from the festivities.

A thunderstorm occurs, and suddenly the electricity fails, but the party rages on until it’s discovered that Irene, thought to be asleep, is missing from her bed. She has been kidnapped, and for a time the film, and especially Cruz as the distraught, disbelieving mother, quite brilliantly evokes the vertiginous switchover from carefree revelry to sheer panic to dazed, horrified helplessness. Laura’s phone buzzes with threats to Irene’s life if an unmatchable ransom demand is not met; Laura turns to Paco for help while Alejandro flies in; the family argue about involving the police; and all the while the suspicion that the kidnapping has to have had some inside help, starts to gnaw at fragile familial bonds.

It’s hard not to notice that Farhadi has used a similar plotline about a missing person before, and to much more resonant effect, in “About Elly.” Here, transposing the action to a culture and a language that is not Farhadi’s native element has a curiously diminishing effect. The potential for rich texture is there, not only in the shared history between Paco and Laura (which feels oddly unconvincing considering it’s coming from real-life partners), but in the subtle classism and prejudice that the family displays toward the migrant workers who are toiling in Paco’s vineyards and to Paco himself. Once a servant for Laura’s more wealthy family, he is now the ostensible winner in their reversal of fortunes. Yet these areas remain frustratingly underdeveloped, and sometimes confusing, when it’s so hard to keep the exact relationships between the sprawling supporting cast in focus (more than most, the film would benefit from a Dramatis Personae flyleaf, and a family tree).

There are twists and turns and even red herrings (the drone camera footage of the wedding keeps teasing some sort of revelation, for example, and never delivering). There’s even a rather superfluous ex-policeman character introduced, while Alejandro’s peculiar religiosity and frequent mentions of God sit awkwardly in the mix. And though Bardem’s character and his performance become more defined and more impressively interiorized as the film goes on (culminating in a final scene that quietly reorients the whole film around Paco), this evolution occurs at the expense of Cruz. Once Laura’s big (and actually pretty predictable) revelation is unveiled, there’s little left for her to do but cry in rooms and cars — which, to be fair, Cruz does immaculately, becoming a kind of duenna of grief.

Leonard Cohen understood the sinister, fatalistic potential of the term “Everybody Knows”: the dice are loaded, the fight is fixed. And setting a twisty missing-girl mystery in a small town rife with long-held grudges and tangled alliances, where everybody knows everyone’s business, and familiarity has bred as much contempt as closeness, should be arable soil for a filmmaker of Farhadi’s intricate, humane intelligence. So it’s perplexing and not a little disappointing that having gone to such lengths to include several strata and substrata of minor characters and side stories “Everybody Knows” should end up such a tidy little three-way melodrama, insulated from any broader comment on this community, let alone “everybody.”

There are still moments, whole sequences really, that remind us of Farhadi’s gift for creating extraordinary tension out of domestic drama. The best scene, in fact, might be one in which the principals aren’t the focus, but in which Laura’s aging, ailing father picks a fight in the local bar, spitting and snarling a lifetime’s store of pent-up resentment at the townspeople he blames for his own failures. It is great because, again, it is real, and it is ordinary and Farhadi’s genius is to be able to take the most ordinary of situations (say, a separation) and turn it into the stuff of gripping sociological drama. But largely, this time out, he’s rather done the reverse: given a gripping premise and a game cast he has engineered perhaps his most ordinary film. [B-]

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