About Elly (Darbareye Elly)
Directed by: Asghar Farhadi
Starring: Taraneh Alidoosti, Golshifteh Farahani, Shahab Hosseini, Merila Zare’i, Mani Haghighi, Peyman Moadi
Specificity is a hard thing to achieve. To do so effortlessly and delicately would be impossible you would think if Asghar Farhadi didn’t do it time and time again. In About Elly (2009), the writer-director immaculately weaves his story, slowly easing the viewer into the specificities they love, hate, struggle through everyday. Religion, marriage, family and ethics, overlap and entangle with beautiful chemistry to craft the complex yet relatable, elegant yet effortless, captivating, suspenseful narrative in this awe-inspiring work of cinema.
Farhadi takes the viewer to the setting, a beach house off the coasts of Iran where a bunch of college friends, now in their thirties, get together for a weekend getaway. Most of them now have spouses and kids. The odd one out is the title character, Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti); A school teacher who has been invited by Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani) as a match for her husband’s friend, Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini). The movie joins in with the close family-like friends. We see them playing charades, singing, dancing, all with their young adult spirits exuding bundles of playful emotions. It’s impressive how Farhadi extracts excellent, natural performances out of this cast, even the children.
Things take a turn for the worst in one morning when a series of events unfold and Elly goes missing. With it, the joyful tone of the movie suddenly changes to a bitter, mysterious, suspenseful one. Now, we see the old friends, husbands and wives, who once we thought were inseparable in the first act of the movie, descend into roiling recrimination when they unearth lies upon lies in their search for Elly’s fate. We learn these untruths as Farhadi reveals bit by bit, unraveling like the layers of an onion, with his masterful style and intricate plotting.
As the story reaches its climax, turmoil and recrimination has taken over the joyful, happy aura of the beach house. Farhadi reveals how the old, tenacious beliefs emerge even from this modern, liberal crowd when pushed to their limits as we see how honor and shame come forth over the matter of whether a person is alive or dead.
About Elly is where Farhadi is in his elements, even eclipsing some feats achieved by his Oscar-winning drama, “A Separation”. It flows ever so naturally. The plot elements are meticulously weaved together and the themes crawl up on the scene and entangle so delicately buffeting our emotions in every direction. And to join Farhadi in this 119-minute mystery thriller is something even the most casual movie fans would enjoy.
“a bitter ending is better than endless bitterness”
