After gaining international recognition with Berlinale entries in Silver Bear for Best Director About Elly (2009) and Golden Bear winning (plus Oscar winning) A Separation in 2011, Asghar Farhadi made the move to Cannes with 2013’s The Past (Bérénice Bejo won Best Actress), 2016’s The Salesman (Best Screenplay and Best Actor for Shahab Hosseini), out of competition Everybody Knows in 2018 and Grand Prix winning A Hero in 2021. His tenth feature in Parallel Tales is loosely based on Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog: Six and has the starry ensemble of Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, Pierre Niney and Adam Bessa. This follows Sylvie, a famous author seeking inspiration on the neighbors across the street, who hires the mysterious Adam as assistant, but he quickly turns her life upside down. Farhadi is a specialist in themes of moral ambiguity and impossible choices, the fragility of truth and the unreliability of testimony mixed in with class, gender, and social pressures in modern Iranian. This is a France, United States, Italy, and Belgium co-production. This is Competition film #4 of 22.
The last Farhadi competition film was 2021’s A Hero and it soared to the top of our charts with a 3.7 average score. This will not be the case here with Parallel Tales. The second film to premiere from the comp (the film receives a France release at the same time) pulled in an average 2.6 – the least favorite of the comp quartet shown so far.
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