At the end of Asghar Farhadi’s Todos lo saben (Everybody Knows) you are left with a sense of loss, for the fate of one of its protagonists Papo, played with deceptive ease by Javier Bardem. A man who is left lonely, adrift and bereft as he gains access to and confronts things about himself that he had been unaware of.
There is a tremendous sense of loss you feel for the film itself, for what it could have been but refuses to be. It’s an odd feeling to have seen an engaging enough work that also rankles you for a hard to pin down emptiness.
Farhadi remains faithful to his oeuvre in his latest outing that opened the Cannes Film Festival last evening to a muted response. Perhaps the Farhadi blueprint is becoming all too familiar to us now. Or perhaps he is getting too entrenched in it. The family continues to be the playground, the frame of domesticity stays even though the cultural context changes -from Iran to Spain. It tweaks things a little: there is more of a flamboyant sexuality and unbound insolence in his world here but Farhadi’s propriety keeps the profligacy in check on screen.
Laura (Penelope Cruz) is in Madrid with her daughter Irene and son Diego to attend her sister’s wedding. It is in the celebrations that Farhadi lets go, the unrestrained merriment, music and dance reminiscent of the wedding in The Godfather. The entire sequence , terrific in its framing, is the film’s highpoint .
Just as in his earlier films there is one disruptive act that throws things asunder with the woman at the receiving end of it. Farhadi builds on the tension, as he has in film after film - A Separation,The Past and The Salesman .There is an ominous air, a lurking fear and lingering sense of suspense but we are soon made to realise that it’s not important. What is of consequence is what the act does to the relationships — how it tears the family apart. It’s all about past catching up, suspicions dredged out, trust getting tested and long held secrets that everybody knew of in private thrown out in public domain. It’s about guilts and lies, secrets and sufferings inherently programmed into marriages, families and relationships with parent-child relationship as it’s fulcrum.
“Not talking things doesn’t mean [they have been] resolved,” says Laura. So the finale might be about seeming resolutions but behind them lie continual renegotiations and a constant flux. It’s about finding one relationship to lose another. There are the social divides and class conflicts too--the fruit workers in the vineyards being in the eye of suspicion--but they remain implicit than overt.
But eventually the broader format of the film turns out to be soap opera like, complete with an awkwardly handled big reveal that anyone can see coming. The topsy turvy ethical battleground of Farhadi’s cinema gets overcome by the emotional manipulation. It divests the film of the characteristic solidity, denseness and complexity of his previous works. The moral dilemmas, societal expectations and role playing of the individuals don’t cut deep enough.
Between the inherent minimalism of his style - all about a lot that is left unsaid than expressed - and the melodrama lies a film in search of a direction.
