Every­body Knows

The eighth fea­ture from Iran­ian film­mak­er Asghar Farha­di cen­tres around a heat­ed fam­i­ly feud in an oth­er­wise qui­et Span­ish set­ting. Cruz plays Lau­ra, a fortysome­thing woman who trav­els with her chil­dren from Buenos Aires to the rur­al town of her birth in order to attend her sister’s wedding.

The cer­e­mo­ny goes off with only the intend­ed hitch, but a black­out at the recep­tion sparks a trau­mat­ic event which reignites old ten­sions between Laura’s clan and a local wine­mak­er named Paco (Bar­dem). As events unfold it becomes appar­ent that, yes, every­body knows, at least in one sense or anoth­er – but that doesn’t make find­ing a solu­tion any more straightforward.

Fam­i­ly pol­i­tics can be a messy old busi­ness, but Farha­di is a mas­ter at explor­ing the minu­ti­ae of rela­tion­ships pre­cise­ly and from dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives, be it a despair­ing moth­er, genial for­mer flame or can­tan­ker­ous patri­arch. He shows how mis­trust and para­noia can dent even the most seem­ing­ly iron­clad of bonds. How secrets and lies can be exploit­ed by those who stand to gain from their expo­sure. And how mon­ey can have a desta­bil­is­ing effect on a group, espe­cial­ly when, as in this case, sev­er­al par­ties feel they have been deprived of their inheritance.

At its best this is a com­pelling and com­pas­sion­ate study of grief; earnest and unsen­ti­men­tal and full of basic human truths. Farha­di presents com­plex moral dilem­mas – the kind we all must face at cer­tain times in our lives – with great clar­i­ty and sense of pur­pose. He con­jures some arrest­ing images too, such as a des­per­ate moth­er search­ing for her miss­ing child in a storm, or birds stream­ing out of a crack in a giant clock face.

The prob­lem is that the film as a whole feels a lit­tle unfo­cused, even over­stuffed com­pared to the director’s ear­li­er works About Elly, A Sep­a­ra­tion and The Past. With so many excep­tion­al­ly tal­ent­ed actors at his dis­pos­al, Farha­di under­stand­ably divvies up the screen­time equal­ly among the prin­ci­pal cast.

Cruz and Bar­dem (and lat­er Ricar­do Darín as Laura’s hus­band, Ale­jan­dro) do most of the heavylift­ing, but there’s very lit­tle back­sto­ry for them to work with, and even less in the way of mean­ing­ful char­ac­ter devel­op­ment. The result is a film of heart-wrench­ing moments that nev­er quite lands a telling emo­tion­al blow.