**/****
directed by Asghar Farhadi
by Angelo Muredda The Past is a heartbreaker, a badly
misjudged project that retraces each major step of Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation but arrives at the finish line with
little to show for itself. Like Farhadi’s previous film, we start with a
divorce, this time between Parisian Marie (Bérénice Bejo, channelling Marion
Cotillard’s more hysterical performances, especially for Christopher Nolan) and
the now Tehran-based Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa), who flies back into town to sign the
papers and see his ex off into her new relationship with Samir (Tahar Rahim).
That Samir has his own troubled past with a woman in a coma for reasons as-yet
unknown doesn’t surprise us as much as Farhadi seems to hope it will, since A Separation also culled its dramatic tension from
a pair of mirrored couples, and made similar symbolic hay of offscreen
characters in extreme states. (There an unborn child and an unspeaking parent
with dementia.) Those who went along with that instrumental use of characters
and rigorous structural doubling did so because the situations in which the
leads were put were so convincing and their reactions to their impossible
situation were almost unbearably moving. Here, one feels trapped in an aggravating
Philip Glass sonata, where each scene exists solely as a foil for the next and each
revelation becomes a transparent set-up for the ensuing real revelation, and so on ad infinitum. The point seems
to be that one never knows in love, but surely some lovers’ actions are less
ambiguous than others. The absurd final shot, which has us reading a motionless
body for either an actual or an imagined emotional response, is the most
maddening example of this noncommittal gamesmanship, a case of a talented but
lost filmmaker having his cake, eating it too, and then proclaiming, “There
is no cake–or is there?”
