About Elly (2009)
Directed by Asghar Farhadi
The mysterious disappearance of a kindergarten teacher during a picnic in the north of Iran is followed by a series of misadventures for her fellow travelers.
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What critics compared About Elly to
Film-history buffs immediately spotted the influence of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 classic “L’Avventura” in this cunning ensemble drama about a group of friends on a seaside vacation torn apart by a woman’s unexplained disappearance, but no degree in cinema studies was required to appreciate Farhadi’s confident control of characters, image and story, or his complex and humane portrait of life inside the Islamic Republic.
It's easy to see Farhadi's story influences in "About Elly," notably Antonioni's "L'Avventura," where a strange disappearance transforms the people left in the picture.
That this vanishing sets up a mystery that propels the rest of the film has led to understandable critical comparisons to Antonioni’s “L’Avventura.”
As search boats and divers are called in and the police wait for Elly's body to be washed up on shore, it's hard not to flash on the drama of the missing woman in Antonioni's "L'Avventura."
A woman goes missing by the sea: the stuff of “L’Avventura,” Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 masterpiece, but also of contemporary Iranian master Asghar Farhadi’s 2009 “About Elly,” only now getting a U. S. release after clearing rights issues.
It starts out with the joie de vivre of an Eric Rohmer beach movie, darkens into the moral complications and complexities of Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game” (1939), and ends with the irresolution and existential dismay of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “L’avventura” (1960).
Paterson awakes, kisses his slumbering wife Laura (About Elly’s wonderful Golshifteh Farahani, showing again Jarmusch’s knack for counterintuitive international casting) goodbye, and walks to work at the bus depot in the New Jersey town that bears his name.
Laura, played by the formidable Golshifteh Farahani (About Elly; There Be Dragons ), is a creative soul as spontaneous and flighty as Paterson is steady and reliable.
Farahani, an Iranian actress who shone in Asghar Farhadi’s 2009 drama About Elly, is a perfectly effervescent balance to Driver’s more muted work.
Laura, played by Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani (who’s in Kiarostami’s “Shirin” and Farhadi’s “ About Elly ”) is more or less a housewife.
At the end of each day, he comes home to a bulldog called Marvin, and to his significant other Laura (Golshifteh Farahani, from Chicken with Plums and About Elly ); the movie never says whether they're married or just living together, and it's not important.
Portrayed with obvious relish by the radiant Farahani (About Elly, Les Deux Amis), Laura is an eccentric, if not entirely deranged, woman-child who is obsessed by black-and-white patterns.