Asghar Farhadi’s (“A Separation”) French drama “The Past” explores the erosive impact of divorce and death on a family already broken by multiple marriages. Members of the disjointed mishap of a family try removing themselves from a cataclysm of a scandal—the infidelity of husband and father Samir (Tahar Rahim, “A Prophet”) and the attempted suicide of his wife Céline (Aleksandra Klebanska, “Happiness Never Comes Alone”).
Without judgment, the film reveals that Samir and Marie (Bérénice Bejo, “The Artist”), the woman he’s having an affair with, were both married with children at the time of their liaison. They wished to be together even as Samir’s wife attempted suicide and landed herself in the hospital, not dead but comatose.
“I prefer to talk about the present,” Samir confesses to his soon-to-be wife, Marie in the film. But he and Marie find themselves facing again and again an ugly, inescapable past that painfully manifests itself in the disparaging maxims and runaway-mentalities of their children.
Samir and Marie, confident that they had kept their relationship secret from Samir’s wife Céline, refuse to believe that their affair had anything to do with her suicide attempt. However, Marie’s daughter Lucie (Pauline Burlet), who never approved of their relationship in the first place, can’t stand to see the two walk off guilt-free. With all due drama and heartbreak, she sets out—armed with a havoc-wreaking secret—to straighten the record.
As if the film is silently mourning its own story, “The Past” is almost entirely without score. In this way, Farhadi allows events to unfold on the screen as they would in reality, without anticipation from musical cues, or emphasis on any one particular event.
Farhadi’s “The Past” is a story of unsavory consequences of reckless human actions, one dramatized with game-changing twists and turns, but not so exaggerated as to believe that it could not be believed. Without judging, but instead begging for the audience to judge, “The Past” tackles domestic issues, sometimes to soap opera-effect, to document a family choking on the sewage of its own destructive doings.
thescene@theeagleonline.com
