About Elly
Ahsgar Fahardi
Ahsgar Fahardi
2009
One of the major aberrations, and the most authoritative, Farhadi installed in his work is the destitution of foreshadowing. Indeed a raw material in every drama, and so is the case in any serious film by every serious filmmaker’s own accord, the film ventured into a courageous function which nonetheless paid off. The early part of the film presents a group of happy people—a picture I don’t recognize too often in an Iranian-Kurdish film. In fact, I fell in love with the fact that Iran this time creates an effort to show a less conservative, less austere, and less political subject matter instead of the notoriety of Middle East terrorism hyped by the Westerns. The first 30 minutes of the film are all devoted to the fun this group of 8 friends and their children engage themselves to enjoy the weekend on a private house off by the seashore; music jamming, charades, volleyball, and simple chatting engrossed everyone. Those scenes are very amusing, so amusing that even though the plot seems to be a little too reserved, almost plotless, it can still entertain you even fastening you to appease for the meantime, before the tragedy strikes. It has that Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant” wriggle—a very unsuspecting beginning and a very abrupt and opposite turn of events. Elly disappeared, without everyone knowing if she has drowned saving a child or if she simply walked away. The genius followed from there on and ingenuity flowed, creativity showcased, and characters revealed. It is not to say that there is an absolute absence of foreshadowing though; few scenes before the last scene of Elly, where she is flying a kite so happily like a child, she mentioned that she would have to go but Sepideh, her student’s mother who invited her, refused. That which I consider the closest to foreshadowing did not give us any hint of the trouble Elly will create, though it gives us the possibility of missing Elly.
The beautiful and demure Elly flying a kite just before the tragedy unbeknownst to everyone.
Honor is a word the film is insinuating until it has been made explicit after Sepideh’s revelation of the real reason she invited Elly in the group’s vacation and why she hide it from all of them. Elly is an engaged woman however, she wishes to break up with his fiancée. Sepideh invites Elly to meet a friend who has just divorced his German wife. Elly refuses and Sepideh insisted with the former getting what she wants. The rest of the group is unaware of the real reason. She wants not to tell the truth to Elly’s fiancée, who arrives in the beach house after the group’s call, because she want to keep Elly’s honor to her fiancée. While the rest of the group’s consensus is to tell the truth to Elly’s fiancée, after all, they are really unaware of it, Sepideh is still reluctant. When she is finally left with nothing but to tell the truth, relinquishing the honor she wanted Elly to keep, she finds a need to keep one to her. When Elly’s fiancée asked Sepideh if she at least refused to go and meet Sepideh’s friend, she answered no, letting him know that she really persuaded Elly in coming with them will officially point the man’s hatred and disgust to her. I commend the fact that this important moral element in the story has been positioned in the very answer to the mystery the group has generated. I would love to distinguish the fact there are actually 2 mysteries running on the film. The first is whether Elly really drowned or just simply went away and second is the more important—Sepideh holding the truth and the group’s stunning interaction after the incidence and the total quest for learning the truth. The honor now is what makes the film Iranian. At first, I am amused by these characters because they are not exactly my stereotype of a Kurdish-Muslim. They are a bit Westernized or commercial I may say, with that constant atmosphere of conservatism. Sepideh’s attempt for an artificial redemption gives an unpretentious enigma to a well understood character study.
The narrative part should be perfect for me, really deserving of the Best Screenplay award it won. The only thing that I wish to have been changed was the employment of hand held camera—the ultimate camera mounting I dislike. Shaking frames definitively corrupts suspension of disbelief, especially in a serious film. There are some mid-tempo panning shots in the film that are already painful and hazy to the eyes, which is just verging to being useless. I understand though that there are some scenes that ideally need a hand held camera, however, a film that can make everything as visually as smooth as possible will always be a superior film. Bahz Luhrman’s “Australia” features one of my favorite chasing and running scenes ever because of its astonishingly polished camera movement despite of the massive motions and consumption of space in the scene—that is where the aborigine child showed Nicole Kidman that the man managing her ranch is only lying about the malfunction of the water tank. Visually-wise, “About Elly” is less exotic and brilliant than some other Middle East movies like “Osama”, “Turtles Can Fly” and “Color of Paradise”. There are also sometimes that I am looking for some changes in the philosophy of the camera. At the early part, you can barely notice shots with single character only which is understandable based on the atmosphere of that part. When the mood switched from leisure and fun to disarray and disturbance, I was expecting more isolated shots of each character. On the other hand, the cinematographer and director still opted for the same philosophy which for me is not a big problem though.
(Topmost) The group the day after the tragedy trying to figure out what happened. (Above) Sepideh reveals the truth to everyone.
Fargadi’s direction of the film is outstanding. I adore how he manages a total shift of tone atmosphere and how well he instructs every actors, especially the children. That ultimate scene which I guess lasted for more or less 20 minutes where the guys are trying to search and save the boy, while women shouting and cowering at the shore, then the others who went to the market came baffled with what is happening, then the boy was saved and now Elly is missing, and so on and so forth, is one powerful work of rigid direction, awesome acting by every single actors (that is without any exaggeration), exquisite editing, and a cinematography at top form. It is on that sequence though that I never got distracted by all the mid to fast tempo panning shots it required, instead I adore the camera movement applied on the sequence where the assumption of space is correlated with multi-character ostensive language of actions. That heck of a sequence is just the powder keg of the eventual and total unleashing of what the film is really made of.
“About Elly” interestingly delineates what people thinks about someone they don’t really know and there is surely no other better scenario to collate them than on a group of people who know each other very well. I am vainly intoxicated with the interaction occurring between these life long friends about thinking what is best, who is right, and how it happened. The emotional and moral make-up of each characters are so diverse that it structured a concerning storyline into a resonating and inescapable haunting of every human being equipped with the simple faculty of reacting. The film consistently keeps the upsurge of tension while it fleshes out and even debones every reasoning human being involved in the plot and finally unveils the mystery, and more importantly learns something that won’t be corrected—no matter how we want to tell the truth, there is a compelling and intangible force that won’t just allow us—and the reason behind it is not political at all.
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