A meaningful scene in Asghar Farhadi’s pretentious psychothriller has Catherine Deneuve (in a delightful cameo) tell Isabelle Huppert’s fading writer Sylvie her new manuscript sounds less like a clever tale of erotic intrigue and more like Georges Simenon. It’s an—though somewhat involuntarily—amusing moment in the Iranian director’s fifth Cannes competition entry, which ends up far less entertaining than it should have. After all, his latest work and second film in the French language seems itself less like a sophisticated reflection on the interplay of imagination and reality both on an artistic and psychopathological level, and more like a sensationalist soap opera.
Its plot, driven in more than one way by Sylvie’s eccentric fabulating, revolves around Sylvie’s spying on her neighbors in the apartment opposite hers. A touch of Hitchcock is unmistakable, though Farhadi is in fact inspired by Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1989 Polish miniseries Dekalog (the sixth chapter about infidelity), and what happens across the years is considerably less exciting than murder. The apartment works as a sound studio for brothers Pierre (Vincent Cassel) and Christophe (Pierre Niney), as well as their colleague Nita (Virginie Efira), who is Pierre’s romantic partner. Fantasizing about a ménage à trois, Sylvie intuitively grasps part of the hidden emotions at play.
Or is the trio she watches through her telescope just a figment of her imagination, based upon an alleged affair her mother had with a neighbor who back in the day was spied on by her father—presumably with the same telescope? But rather than allow his audience to immerse themselves in this voyeuristic dynamic, Farhadi throws in another character in delinquent drifter Adam (Adam Bessa). Thanks to an absurd coincidence, the unhoused young man ends up living at Sylvie’s apartment as household help and becomes even more obsessive than her. He steals her manuscript, presenting it as his own work to Nita, whom he starts stalking.
Creepier than the scenario itself is the fact that Farhadi frames it as a tender, even protective gesture and presents Adam as a positive character, no matter how despicably and manipulatively he behaves toward everyone around him. Beneath the paltry psychological exterior runs an uncomfortable chauvinist narrative that says more about the director’s fantasies about women’s supposed hidden desires than about life imitating art and vice versa. Overstrained by too many characters and plot lines, the exaggerated story’s feeble structure ultimately collapses, leaving a cluster of loose narrative threads and contradicting psychological implications. These dramatic faults and the sheer hilariousness of the whole affair wouldn’t matter much, were Parallel Tales only entertaining.
But for all its lurid themes of voyeurism, betrayal, sexual obsession, perverted passion, and forbidden relationships, the result turns out to be frustratingly stale and derivative. Promising elements, such as the lo-fi sound effects Nita and Théo create for silent film material, unravel into empty gestures. Guillaume Deffontaines‘ camera remains curiously detached, amplifying the emotional distance to a set of characters about whom one never cares enough to figure out what parts of their stories are “real” within the narrative and what parts are made up. Reliable but somewhat listless acting can’t invigorate the overly constructed clichés that don’t dare to embrace their own parallels to pulp.
- OT: Histoires Parallèles
- Director: Asghar Farhadi
- Year: 2026
