Krzysztof Kieślowski’s classic “Dekalog” series boasts a whopping ten-hour runtime and, yet, somehow feels sprightlier and briefer than Asghar Farhadi’s adaptation of one of its chapters, “Parallel Tales.” The Iranian filmmaker guides his lukewarm homage to the seminal work of the renowned Polish director with an A-list French cast, crafting an examination of the traps of creativity that lacks the driving force of the spark it sets out to dissect.
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Isabelle Huppert is the film’s beating heart as Sylvie, an eccentric, reclusive writer who finds inspiration for her next novel in the trio of foley artists working in the building across the street: Virginie Efira’s Nita, Vincent Cassel’s Nico and Pierre Niney’s Theo. On her pages, they transform into Anna, Pierre and Christophé, embroiled in a thorny love triangle shaped by the unpredictable hands of lust and revenge and captured in minute detail by overhanging professional microphones.
Sylvie splits her time between peeping at the three through a telescope carefully placed by her window, boiling glass jars to avoid microwave radiation, and scooping tuna from cans that will eventually graduate to overfilled ashtrays piled around her cluttered apartment. One fateful afternoon, the writer’s niece knocks on the door carrying both a warning — her aunt must vacate so they can sell their shared property and cash in — and an odd proposition in the shape of Adam (Adam Bessa), a mysterious young man whom she met by happenstance and who could perhaps lend Sylvie a much-needed helping hand.
While the dynamics are rapidly laid out during the film’s opening scenes, what comes after drags with the torturous languor. Farhadi piles up interminable minutes observing Efira’s feet shuffling through sand while Huppert haunts her own cloistered abode like a living ghost. Adam, who spends half the film as a half-baked prop, fully steps into the Hitchcockian hues of the voyeuristic premise in the latter part, a 180 that, despite mercifully boosting the film’s pace, does very little to redeem a character conceived solely to tie the apathetic knots of the plot.
While Kieślowski’s work often partook in similar languidness to observe the unappreciated intricacy of routine, in Farhadi’s hands, this formal tendency leads to a sustained sense of frustration. As the characters traverse between the real and the fictional, with Efira whipping out a terribly fashioned wig and Cassel combing his thinning hair a few degrees to the other side, the mind wanders to the could-have-beens, a futile exercise given that one should take the film at its flawed face value instead of wishing it fulfilled an imagined potential.
It is only in its final chapter that “Parallel Tales” at last seems to understand how to dial into its thesis. Once the written page ceases to be a tiresome framing device and becomes part of the diegesis, we can fully appreciate how one’s perception of our lives can ultimately shape how we live. It is a much-needed breath of fresh air into a stale film, even if it, too, introduces some nagging creases to already muddled dynamics. While all that came before unraveled listlessly, this last stretch presents the opposite problem, rushing at issues of desire and betrayal with confounding carelessness.
The foley trio, tasked with dual roles, chooses to lean into caricature to exaggerate the contrast between their imagined and real selves. It works to a jarring effect, with Efira going from doe-like drabness to a tortured Delilah, and Cassel from a hip-swinging womanizer to a meek, pill-popping chauvinist. Bessa has the trickiest job of all, attempting to imbue his Adam with a sliver of nuance when the character is built to wander blindly into the traps of social perception. It is a performance that finds solace only in scenes shared with Huppert, the veteran drenching her off-kilter author with the sense of fun and playfulness the film lacks almost entirely.
Farhadi peppers the 140-minute drama with a myriad of Kieślowski references, most notably repurposing some of the famed “Dekalog” music. While the original work merited the dramatic, incisive piano, its rereading makes it feel like a gimmick, bringing in the loud notes to punctuate moments that only emphasize the sparseness of the affair. This very much symbolizes the central issue with “Parallel Tales,” a film that hungrily gorges at greatness only to regurgitate the blandest, most forgettable possible byproduct. [D]
Rafa Sales Ross is a Brazilian film journalist, critic and programmer currently living in Scotland. She contributes to Variety, BBC Culture, Sight & Sound among others, and can often be seen writing about Latin American Cinema and explorations of death and desire.
