When your first film so beautifully and perfectly captures the struggles of the human condition, there’s really nowhere to go but down. Thankfully, a not great Asghar Farhadi film is still surprisingly deep and consistently engaging to watch. His latest takes him from Iranian divorce to a Spanish wedding/kidnapping. Of course, everybody knows that’s what Farhadi was going to do next right?
The wedding is between a Spanish couple: Mariana (Elvira Minguez) and Fernando (Eduardo Fernandez). They’re getting married in their small little home town in Spain, which is drawing in all the overseas relatives as well as the locals, including Mariana’s older sister Laura (Penelope Cruz). Laura brought her kids including her daughter Irene (Carla Campra), but all eyes are on how Laura will react to seeing her ex Paco (Javier Bardem) with his now wife Bea (Barbara Lennie). Apparently too many eyes were on these two, because during the wedding reception, Irene vanishes. Laura then receives a text asking for money for her daughter, with a despondent family and friends, especially Paco, desperate to help in any way they can.
Farhadi is not a bad director, but his true talents are his intricate, deeply emotional screenplays. What the talented writer figured out was that he wanted to tell deeply emotional character dramas, but those stories are tough sells outside of the arthouse world. So in order to generate more mass appeal, he crafts a twisty mystery in each story that Agatha Christie would be proud of. Everybody Knows draws you in with the wedding, which contains our characters and our list of suspects. If you’ve seen a Farhadi movie, you know the mystery is coming about 20-30 minutes in after establishing the characters. For this story, if you’re paying attention, you can immediately assume the suspect is 1 of 3 people, though Farhadi does his best to keep you off the scent of the real perpetrator. Like any good writer, he layers other mysteries on top of the central one to keep you interested, but the kidnapper story clearly doesn’t interest Farhadi as other parts of the story.
Thankfully, the character elements make up for any deficiencies in the central mystery. Farhadi’s story slowly pivots to a story about Paco and Laura, and how their relationship and its fallout has informed everyone in their family. This is a family that has kept their feelings and secrets buried to keep a facade of niceness, but due to the current stresses, all those buried feelings rise to the surface. This increases level of revelation deepens the sadness across the entire city and you feel it reverberate, especially from Javier Bardem, who slowly becomes a shell of himself as more and more understanding comes his way. The whole cast is really good here, in particular Bardem and Cruz, anchoring the story, and Ricardo Darin and Barbara Lennie coming in halfway and carrying the second half as Laura’s and Paco’s better halves. The group completely sells all the twists and turns, and clearer emotional scars and burdens left behind from past sins compounding the current ones.
Everybody Knows is not for the faint of heart, much like all of Asghar Farhadi’s films. It’s a spider web of tangled emotions and plot twists, with each character a fly to be feasted on by the spider. And yet, in spite of the despondence of the worst wedding gift of all time, you’re still riveted to the screen by the acting and casually stellar writing of one of the greats of our time, or any time for that matter.