Ashgar Farhadi returns to the Cannes Film Festival for the fifth time in competition with Parallel storiesa film shot in Paris with a great cast around Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Effira, Adam Bassa, Vincent Cassel and Pierre Niney.
Sylvie, a writer, observes through binoculars her neighbors across the street, a trio who make sound effects for animal documentaries, to feed her novel. The writer must soon move so that her pregnant niece can recover the money from the sale. The latter introduces her to Adam, a young man she met in the metro, to help her pack the boxes. His arrival will reshuffle the cards for all the protagonists in this story.
A few hours before walking the red carpet with his team, the Iranian director confided to franceinfo Culture what is hidden behind this film where fiction and reality mix to the point of merging. Presented on May 14 in Cannes, Parallel stories released the same day in theaters.
What did you want to say with this film?
It’s really very difficult to explain in a few words what we want to say through a film. It’s always a journey into the unknown, it’s always a curiosity that pushes you on a path whose steps you don’t even know. In this case, for this film, it really was that. I wanted to explore these unknown lands that opened up through the creation of this story and this film. I think, despite everything, that what gave me the courage to continue and develop this film project further, is this question of the medium, not to say the media, this way that we have through a telescope, a small piece of a telescope, to see scraps of something and to invent a whole story. about these bits and pieces, And to notice that once you get to the other side, you see that it’s something completely different, a completely different story, ultimately.
How did you work on the staging to indicate the shifts between reality and fiction, and the border in the film is often blurred, including in the image, why?
Obviously, the simplest thing, if we had wanted to make the spectator’s task easier, would have been to create two completely distinct universes, so that at the first image, the spectator could say to himself here I am in reality, there I am in fiction. But since the film is precisely trying to show to what extent this limit is porous, to what extent the circulation from one to the other occurs naturally, I took the risk of letting the spectator get lost a little at the beginning, of not telling them precisely what world they are in, since it is a question of the ambiguity and porosity of this border between the two dimensions.
The reality that inspires fiction is classic. But you have imagined a story where fiction will come to scratch reality a little. Why this choice?
This part is the most important of the film. The directors, the authors, are inspired by reality. What interested me was to see how stories, how fictions, how stories can constitute a kind of destiny, a kind of fate that grips beings. This is something I am absolutely convinced of. In our lives, the stories we are fed, the stories we are told, everything that constitutes our imagination, have a very strong impact on the choices we make in life and on the directions we take, and which we believe we take freely, but which ultimately are dictated to us by all this imagination which is instilled in us. And there, obviously, I am also referring to the role of the media in our lives. What is presented to us as information or as documentary are constructed stories. And these constructed stories have a considerable part in the way we form ourselves, the way we think, the way we project ourselves, the way we write ourselves, the way we evolve in our lives. And for me, it’s something much more massive than what a writer does who draws inspiration from reality to write.
It is therefore also a film which questions us about manipulation, about what we can try to make us believe with images?
Specifically, Sylvie observes her neighbors across the street who make sound effects on animal documentaries. Because if there is one area where we believe that it is the zero degree of fiction, where we think that there is nothing invented, that it is truly raw reality, nature as it is, as it presents itself to us, it is the animal documentary. Now we clearly see that everything is constructed, that we use artifices to reinvent reality. It’s a way for me, a way of questioning, of asking a question about what is real, and of asking ourselves if what is offered to us, shown as real, can be believed and taken literally…
It’s a film that seemingly speaks to us about manipulation. In this sense can we see it as a political film?
Of course, without making it a credo, without wanting to put it in the foreground, it is part of the dimensions that are there in the film’s sequence.
It is a film that can also be seen as a film about exile. Adam is an exile, we don’t really know where he comes from, and Sylvie is in a form of internal exile, is that something you had in mind when writing the film?
Yes, they are in exile, or rather in solitude. Exile or solitude. They live in one place, but their heart is elsewhere. They live in the city of Paris, it is the most lively city in the world, but they feel alone. As her editor, played by Catherine Deneuve, says, Sylvie has isolated herself, cut herself off from the world, hidden in this place and it’s as if she only sees the world through the viewfinder of her telescope. Maybe she is in exile yes, in any case, she is in solitude. There is a proverb in Persian which says: “I am surrounded by people and yet I am not there, I am alone. Sylvie and Adam are surrounded by lots of people, there are people around them, but they are alone. So the film says something, yes, about isolation, about solitude. It’s a very important dimension in Kiełowski’s cinema. Perhaps unconsciously, it’s something that has rubbed off on the universe of my film. It’s true that the characters in this film are more solitary than those in my previous films.
For what ? Is it a feeling that you feel more today, loneliness?
It’s something natural. I think everyone, as they age, feels more alone. No doubt, this comes from a better knowledge of oneself and one’s environment. The more we understand who we are and who those around us are, the less perhaps we feel part of a group. I really have the impression that the major concern in human existence is to fight against loneliness and death. I really have the impression that if we form friendships, if we fall in love, if we love, if we have children, if we work, it’s really a way of trying to counter loneliness and death. There are people who say that what we seek in life is serenity, joy. But I rather have the impression that these are the two great scourges that inhabit us.
Is solitude also a necessary state for creation?
Yes, solitude is a sanctuary. It is a kind of setting necessary for the creation, for the invention of a story. It’s like a void that we create within ourselves to make stories emerge.
At the end there is a sort of liberation for Sylvie and especially for Adam, no, which comes through access to the imagination, no?
What I really like is when everyone, depending on what he or she has within themselves, can open the book in a certain way and perceive the film in their own way. In any case, for me, what indisputably appears at the end, what the character of Adam accesses in any case, is a liberation through creation. It’s a catharsis, this inner cleansing that the pleasure of being able to create brings. It’s obvious that the Adam we see at the end of the film is not the same as at the beginning.
You film Paris like a real Parisian, an intimate Paris, seen from the inside, far from clichés, why?
That was one of the main challenges of the three films that I shot abroad, to ensure that we don’t have the feeling that it’s someone who arrives, who discovers and who looks at the city from the outside. I can’t pretend that I know Paris, that I’m a Parisian, but as I have come often, I really tried to absorb Paris, and to restore an intimate vision of it, precisely so that a Parisian who sees the film feels at home.
You are in Cannes for the fifth time, what does that mean to you?
Discovering your film with the Cannes public is always a great joy, a great moment, because there is such a great diversity of spectators, it is an event on such a global scale that it is obviously very galvanizing to say to ourselves that we are going to show this film to this audience and We are going to see it ourselves, we are going to discover it in the company of this audience. Then, as a filmmaker, when you come to Cannes with a film as a spectator, you see nothing. You don’t see a film, you don’t see the festival, you spend your time on interviews like this. My best memory of Cannes remains the first, the very first time I came here, I didn’t have a film in the selection, so I went to see films, I walked around, I was just a festival goer, it was great!
