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‘About Elly’ exemplifies writer-director Farhadi’s storytelling gifts

The Columbian
Published: June 19, 2015, 12:00am

The Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi came to most American filmgoers’ attention in 2011 with his taut, Academy Award-winning divorce drama “A Separation,” which he followed up last year with “The Past.” Thanks to some rights issues finally being resolved, an early Farhadi film, the 2009 drama “About Elly,” is now hitting theaters, and it offers an intriguing glimpse of an artist honing the themes and tonal values that he would balance so perfectly just a few years later.

As “About Elly” opens, a group of exuberant young Tehran professionals and their families are making their way to the Caspian seaside for a brief vacation. The group, including three married couples and a recently divorced friend visiting from his adopted home in Germany, knew each other in college and enjoy the kind of teasing, candid intimacy that those years engender. The title character is something of an outsider, having been brought along by one of the women in the hopes that she might hit it off with the clique’s newly single friend.

Farhadi takes his time establishing the relationships and atmosphere in “About Elly,” most of which transpires in a scenically abandoned beach home.

And the filmmaker adroitly plants little bits of foreshadowing of the cataclysm that he stages with ingenious discretion, allowing momentary tragedy to give way to a good old-fashioned psychological mystery.

Part finely-tuned chamber piece, part thriller and part political allegory, “About Elly” could be read any number of ways, from an Iranian “Big Chill” to a subtle critique of the mendacity, hypocrisy and repressive gender politics fostered by the Islamic Revolution.

The performances are consistently first-rate from a cast of appealing actors who slip effortlessly into Farhadi’s naturalistic aesthetic scheme, which seems utterly unforced even at its most intricately staged. Occasionally, as with “The Past,” the author’s hand is too visible, in the form of hysterically pitched melodrama. But “About Elly” is nonetheless a fascinating discovery from a filmmaker whose sensitivity to the most confounding motivations is equaled only by his compassion for those who succumb to them.

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