The most shocking thing in Parallel Tales is Isabelle Huppert lighting a cigarette with a toaster. There’s a sense of unpredictability in that one moment that the rest of Parallel Tales was aiming for and somehow didn’t achieve. It’s hard to say why it falls so flat, since there is real potential for danger here in many of the interactions. Unfortunately they vanish in a puff of smoke.
Homeless Adam (Adam Bessa) gives chase to a pickpocket on the Paris metro and for his trouble is stopped by the cops. The woman whose wallet he saved, Laurence (the proud owner of the best name in showbiz, India Hair), realises his good turn deserves another. She has an aunt, Sylvie (Ms. Huppert), who is recovering from an accident and therefore mostly housebound, but who also is dillydallying on moving out of the apartment she and Laurence co-own so it can be sold. So Laurence hires Adam to help with the move. This means the heavy lifting but also coaxing Sylvie into re-engaging with the world. Sylvie is not at all worried about an indigent stranger suddenly having full access to her home. No, she is pleased by the company, mostly because now she has a captive audience for her observations.
Sylvie is a writer who grew up in an apartment across the street which is now a sound effects studio. (In a good running gag, other characters are shown watching the shows for which the studio does the effects. The sound effects crew must have had a wonderful time.) She is struggling badly with her latest book, even when Catherine Deneuve shows up for a delightful one-scene cameo as her agent. Sylvie starts telling Adam the stories she’s writing about the studio’s three workers, an older man (Vincent Cassel), a younger one (Pierre Niney), and the woman in between (Virginie Efira). The stories are so interesting, and sexy, that Adam enthusiastically joins her in spying on them. But it doesn’t take long for Adam to meddle with the people in the studio, though it takes him a little longer to realise their true identities are not the ones Sylvie has described. Suffice to say, when the people in the studio learn strangers have been talking about them, things change again completely.
Now. The entire concept of Adam’s character is that he is an unknown quantity. It’s clear Adam has a dark past and an uncertain future, but there’s something about Mr Bessa that means you like and you trust him. When Adam is pottering through Sylvie’s apartment, even snooping frankly, you still have the sense that he means well and is simply curious about everything and everyone he encounters. But when writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s script requires him to be obviously menacing, things don’t work. This is also because none of the people from the studio feel authentic on any level. We never see them without Sylvie’s influence: in other words, we don’t know who they are separate to her peeping. Therefore their interactions with Adam only feel forced, and it’s impossible to believe any of their interactions with anybody. At least this was also not the only film in the Cannes competition this year about people grappling with the real-life consequences of an artistic decision. But just as in Bitter Christmas, Mr. Farhadi was clearly able to come up with an ending for one of his plotlines and not the other.
The thing is that people entertain this kind of passing fancy all the time. We watch people and make up quick little stories about what they’re like, why they’re there, and where they’re going from here. It can be quite harmless, these passing fantasies, but only if they remain in our own heads. It’s very upsetting when others disturb your privacy, or imagine they know anything about you based on how you dress or who you are eating lunch with. The ways Mr. Cassel, Mr. Niney and Ms. Efira manage to bring two different personalities to their actions is very impressive, and how their interplay twists and turns could have been pretty cool. But it’s so calculated that nothing feels genuine, or at least startling. There needed to be plenty more moments like the cigarette in the toaster. Instead Parallel Tales tries so hard to be unpredictable that it just falls apart.
Parallel Tales (Histoires parallèles) recently played at the Cannes Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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