OVERVIEW
How much of who we really are is shaped by outside forces, by the words of people we have never met, or even by the characters in books we read? Asghar Farhadi sets that question in a Paris apartment, with a telescope pointed across the street. Parallel Tales opens on blocked novelist Sylvie (Isabelle Huppert), who watches three Foley artists at work in a sound-effects studio opposite her windows and writes them into a book they will never know exists. When she hires Adam (Adam Bessa), a young ex-con, as her assistant, he reads the discarded manuscript and starts pushing the strangers across the street into the plot.
BACKGROUND
A director far more associated with moral-realist drama than thriller mechanics, Farhadi arrives at his fifth time in Cannes Competition with a film he describes as having pushed him across his own “red lines,” admitting to Reuters that formal playfulness was something he had previously refused himself. Living outside Iran since 2023 and continuing to refuse to make films there until censorship rules are lifted, he hesitantly agreed to direct after 31-year-old Polish actor-producer Maciej Musiał met with him to pitch an unusual project: a contemporary reinterpretation of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog, with ten international directors taking one chapter each. The film premiered in Competition and met one of the harshest critical receptions of Farhadi’s career, with most reviewers arguing the red lines were there for a reason.
THE REVIEW
Farhadi is not particularly interested in exploring the themes such a premise invites, choosing instead to have a little fun with Hitchcock and French thriller pastiche along the way. There are rewards in the detour, but the film stretches well past the point where any of them matter, and Parallel Tales becomes a curious case of an established director missing his own basics.
Working with a heavyweight French cast, after assembling the best Spanish actors he could find for Everybody Knows, Farhadi builds a web of events that is easy to follow but never connects as meaningfully as expected. At times, it recalls Nocturnal Animals, with considerably fewer layers to unpack. Here and there, a stronger parallel surfaces between the story being told and the woman telling it, or between certain motifs and Farhadi’s career-long fixation on divorce, infidelity, and the dishonesties inside relationships. Other beats, like Sylvie’s passage about her father, land more as individual sketches that add little to the whole.
Scenes like a murder inside a car show that Farhadi has the Hitchcock chops, and his eye for visual moments and precise cutting are there. It is also interesting to hear Zbigniew Preisner’s harp- and piano-led score in thriller mode. But the stories never take hold, neither individually nor in their connections. The film is at least thirty minutes too long, and the script keeps opening new threads, lingering on long detours, and by the time it finally returns to its main storyline, it becomes very difficult to care.
FINAL THOUGHTS
What makes Parallel Tales so frustrating is that, somewhere inside its criminally long runtime, there are individual scenes worthy of Farhadi, yet he, like the film’s protagonist, never quite follows through on the ideas they raise, and the film ends up reading like a stack of discarded drafts someone stitched back together. In the movie’s strongest scene, the editor, played by Catherine Deneuve, tells Sylvie that audiences have changed and that all of this is old-fashioned. I agree in parts, yet I am of the mind that a (considerably) tighter version of the same film could have stood among the heights of Farhadi’s career.