The Past - A thought provoking, whirlwind of complex emotions

It’s a movie that haunts. It is an unsettling drama that claims you and there is no way you can get done with it. The more you try to make peace with it the more it lurks. Yes, that’s the effect this movie will have on you.  If you are looking for answers, watch out!! All that this movie has to offer is questions and that’s where its beauty lies.

It chokes and makes you see the grey in life; it brings you face to face with characters that are essentially good. It’s a story about three people who are failed by their good intentions.

Failed marriage, illicit relationship, parenting, hidden motives and the desperate need to seek happiness is the edifice on which Ashgar Farhidi models The Past. It’s not at all strange to see how each character in the movie is linked with the other and how difficult it’s for them to break the ties that are already broken. Each character has their own story and reasons and each one of them is noble in their depravity.

Movie opens with Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) the estranged husband to Marie who heads back to Paris to settle his past. Marie (Bérénice Bejo) survivor of two failed marriages and a mother of two daughters, she yearns for a divorce to get settled with her new boyfriend and then there is Samir (Tahar Rahim) Marie’s boyfriend.

Of all the three, Samir is the one whose life is fucked the most. Left with a son and a comatose wife, he has the ugly reality of his wife’s fouled up suicide attempt to deal with.

 Ahmad comes to Paris in the search for closure. His desire to get divorced with Marie and end everything on a happy note is thwarted when he is dragged in Marie’s present life. There is an unfinished business between the two. Ahmad left Marie 4 years ago and has to pay off by dealing with her boyfriend’s son (Faud) and council her elder daughter (Lucie) to accommodate Samir in their life. Lucie like every other daughter wants her mother to be happy. She is tired of her mother’s fleeting romances and is unable to understand why men in her mother’s life don’t stay. Lucie has a secret that alters her mother’s chances of happiness and it’s her secret that shifts the story and leads us to the end.

But, like I said, Ashagar Faridi doesn’t offer you any answers. The way he twists the truth in each character’s hand and how it leads to the wrong beginnings is an act of marvel. Ashgar Faridi doesn’t corrupt the movie with grandiose instead he keeps it real without any music and minimum props. He makes his characters speak more with the expressions and less with dialogues. Every frame in which Bérénice Bejo is caught up with speaks volumes. Her bottled up frustration, helplessness and her anger is witnessed in her expressions. He does an excellent job in making us stay with her in witnessing her wretchedness. The scene where she waits on the road and asks Lucie to come back home will make you one with her emotions. He is a ruthless director who makes us witness intense suffering and the only antidote he offers is that he makes it easy for us to empathize with the characters.

He throws these hints at the reader and asks the audience to form a reality with it. He lets us gauge the relationship between Marie and Ahmad when she spits bitterness towards Ahmad, “When you play the good guy and try to teach us something, I really hate you.”

We know Marie isn’t able to let go of Ahmad when Lucie breaks it to Ahmad, “Do you know why she fell in love with that jerk? Because he looked like you”. We know Faud doesn’t hate Marie when he asks Samir why he can’t stay at Marie’s place.

 We know as much as Samir despises his wife for committing suicide and jeopardizing his life, he isn’t thoughtlessly selfish and does care for her when he asks her, “Squeeze my hand if you feel anything, Celine”. The closing shot is one of the best shot scenes and reveals a lot about the dilemma and human emotions.

The past neither instructs nor delights instead it blurs the line where it is difficult to separate the past from the present. A thought-provoking, whirlwind of complex emotions, it’s a saga of uncertainty and failed attempts to seek happiness.