IFFK ‘09 Diary-About Elly (Darbareye Elly) (2009): Crowning the Competition line–up review
About Elly is undoubtedly a major film on show at the 14th IFFK. It is making its Indian Premiere at the IFFK. It has already won the Silver Bear (Best Director) award at Berlin, one of the top three festivals in the world. Apart from this recignition, the film has already won awards at three other minor festivals (Asia-Pacific, Brisbane, and Tribeca) and at Iran’s national festival at Fajr. Finally, it is Iran’s submission for the best Foreign Film at the 2010 Oscars. With an Iranian director heading the 14th IFFK jury, this film is unlikely to go unrewarded. More than anything else, the participation of About Elly in competition propped up the image of the IFFK’s competition segment.
What is the film about? As in the case of most Iranian films it has no sex or violence and yet provides clean entertainment for adults. It is a tale of how we view others, however close or distant we are. It’s a tale of value judgments we make in everyday life. Now these value judgments could often be colored by small lies or exaggerations that could leapfrog into greater problems that one could ever imagine.
The story line is basically of a young unmarried woman Elly who joins three families on a vacation to the Caspian Sea coastline of Iran. Elly has been invited by Sepideh to spend a night with the three families, Sepideh being one of the three wives in the group. The only relationship established between the two is that Elly teaches Sepideh’s child at school and that Elly could be paired off with one eligible divorced male in the group if the two get to like each other. While the elders are busy playing volleyball or away shopping, a child nearly drowns and is rescued. Elly who was asked to keep an eye on the kids disappears. Has she drowned? Has she left for the city as she had wanted to? Her mother, in Teheran, is not aware of where she is vacationing. Why is that?
The tale is cleverly developed from that point of Elly’s disappearance by Farhadi, who is also the co-author of the story and the screenplay-writer. There is another co-author of the tale, Iranian writer-director Azad Jafarian. Thankfully, the group tells the police only facts as they knew at that point of time. The lies emerge later. Even a well-intentioned joke that Elly is a newly wed, a joke stated to get access to an accommodation at the holiday spot spirals into complications later in the film. And so on. The film goes beyond social comment and a thriller. Relationships get shattered. In a way, it recalls the ending of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s recent Turkish film Three Monkeys and easily could be called Three Monkey Families.
While film deserves all the adulation it is receiving and will receive, Indian viewers will recall a similar tale filmed by an Indian director Mrinal Sen (who inaugurated the 14th IFFK) from a story by Ramapada Chowdhury. The film was called Ek din Achanak (1989) which competed in Venice and even received an honorable mention from the jury. Like Elly disappears in About Elly, in Ek din Achanak, a professor and head (played by Dr Shreeram Lagoo) of a family, that included his two daughters and a son, suddenly disappears without explanation or trace. That Mrinal Sen film also developed a parallel story to that of Farhadi..
While Farhadi’s work ought to be appreciated, Indian audiences ought to look back at works of Mrinal Sen to compare and contrast the two works. Both Farhadi and Sen have a following at IFFK. For Farhadi, this is the second time that a film made by him has graced the Competition line-up at IFFK. A couple of years ago, Farhadi’s Fireworks Wednesday competed at IFFK and won the hearts of many. I look forward to Sen handing over an award to Farhadi at IFFK to complete a 20-year cycle of ideas in two different nations.
