Penélope Cruz, left, and her real-life husband, Javier Bardem, star in the thriller.
Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi has given us some of the most simple, most beautiful movies of recent vintage: The Salesman, The Past, A Separation. His films are delicately wrought portraits of broken families struggling to right themselves. These are not plot-driven movies, but rather tenderly gripping exercises in coming to the realization that all families, all of us as individuals, are broken in our own ways — that there is no such thing as an unbroken human being.
Initially, Farhadi’s latest, Everybody Knows — his first Spanish-language film — appears on track to be much the same sort of experience. Laura (Penélope Cruz) has just returned home to her small Spanish village after living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for many years, for her sister’s wedding. Her husband hasn’t come along — work obligations have kept him home — but her two children, teen Irene (Carla Campra) and grade-schooler Diego (Iván Chavero), are having a blast with their cousins, and Laura is joyously catching up with her raucous extended family and hometown friends, who seem to comprise almost the whole village, including local winemaker Paco (Javier Bardem) and his wife, Bea (Bárbara Lennie).
It’s a bit tricky keeping track of who is who and who’s related to whom and how everyone is connected, but it doesn’t matter. That’s kind of the point: that the deep, lifelong interconnections among all these people make them inseparable, reliant on one another for favors, big and small, in unquestioning ways. Farhadi’s exquisite, incisive talent for plunging us into a flow of affection, bickering and intricate, inextricable relationships seems to be in fine form. If the wedding sequence doesn’t make you wish you were there, partying with all these people, you might be dead inside.
But from there — the wedding is early on in the film — Everybody Knows takes a turn it never recovers from. Farhadi has indulged in more “plot” this time around, but he flounders with it. Something transpires at the wedding — I shan’t spoil — that morphs the film into a mystery. It’s the stuff of a melodramatic thriller, a riddle to be urgently solved and an immediate trauma to overcome. And as Farhadi attempts to meld this sudden eruption of potboiler with his usual slow-burning humanistic drama, there is little space for either cinematic impulse to be satisfied.
The aftermath of the event at the wedding is the jumping-off point for profound cracks to start showing in the relationships of the people all around Laura, as family secrets bubble up to the surface and long-held resentments threaten to fracture the previous status quo. Yet there’s little that’s surprising or emotionally revelatory about anything we learn; indeed, the title of the film refers to the fact that there are few secrets among such a tight-knit group of people in such a small community. That’s a strangely anticlimactic stand, emotionally, for Farhadi to take, and it works against the mystery narrative as well, particularly when the resolution of it would appear to demand that there are secrets — open secrets — among these people that we are not made privy to. The explanation about what has been going on springs from nowhere; it’s not specifically related to anything we’ve seen transpire.
It’s so disappointing to see a filmmaker like Farhadi, who has been so powerfully grounded in authentic human feeling and experience in his drama before, toy with his characters the way he does here. He leaves us hanging, feeling not like we’ve lived a life with those on the screen, but instead scrambling for a connection to them at all. His mystery undermines the humanity, and his humanity undermines the mystery. It’s a sad place for us to be. n
