Partway into Iranian director Asghar Farhadi's About Elly, a red BMW gets stuck in the sand on a Caspian Sea beach. At the end of the movie, the car is still there – bright red against the off-white sand. But now, the tide has started to rise. Farhadi is good at metaphor, and this car pretty much says it about the people trying in vain to push it out of this predicament.
It don't start out this way. At first, About Elly is quick and bright and green and beautiful with a group of late 20-somethings heading to the seashore: three couples, a few young children and two singles. Sepideh, one of the married women, hopes that the singles might like each other. These prosperous young adults are smart and playful, and exceptionally good-looking. They make jokes and wisecracks; the sun is shining.
The young women all wear headscarves, but otherwise they could be Americans. These are secular people. They have no problem with men and women together on a holiday and no one seems to care that two of them are unmarried.
A story came out of Tehran recently about a young couple who were killed when the woman lost control of the man's Porsche at 120 miles per hour. Apparently, there's a great deal of resentment against a privileged class of rich young people in Iran. These characters are of that class, but they're not that reckless, at least not in the same way. They have a joyous time in their beach house, until something happens with Elly, the single woman. That takes up the rest of the film.
Director Asghar Farhadi won an Oscar for his 2011 movie A Separation, about a divorce in Tehran. He has an eye for how comfortable, secular, urban young marrieds in Iran react to crises.
In About Elly, Farhadi keeps the camera close and he keeps it moving. When things are good, you share the high spirits of the people; it feels like a party. But over time, the nonstop cinematography grows tiresome. The camera work starts to feel too close, so that you're just getting too-fast glimpses of things you may want to see more clearly. Elly looks elusive; she hangs around the periphery; she never quite joins in. When the others turn giddy, Elly's reserved.
The "something" that happens is that Elly vanishes. Suddenly, everything falls apart. The movie begins to dissect this corner of Iranian society, which turns out to be terribly fragile. This world has no foundation. Whatever people say is unreliable, and even when the lies become apparent, people keep lying. No one wants to tell the truth. They'll say anything to get past the immediate moment and not a one of them can see 10 minutes into the future when the lie they just told will have to be altered with another short-term fix.
It turns out that these young people are far less liberated from typical Iranian society than they want to admit. When the crisis deepens and the pressure grows, the men take over. They boss the women around. Sepideh is the woman who invited Elly along, and Sepideh's husband starts to beat her for lying. The other men and women stop him, but the egalitarian pretense is over; the men rule; the women turn subservient and a rigid morality sets in.
About Elly is Asghar Farhadi's third film to come to this country, but Farhadi made it in 2009, two years before A Separation. The movie's original distributor had legal troubles and the film was shelved until this year. It's a less subtle work than either A Separation or Farhadi's 2013 picture The Past. But About Elly has real power. As Farhadi peels away the layers of deception, he shows a society in serious trouble, stuck like that red BMW, and putting on a sophisticated appearance that's too thin to last.
