This one was added to my list after Tyler Cowen commented it to be even better than A Separation, which is easily one of my favorite films from the past few years. Made by the same director Asghar Farhadi, it actually predates A Separation by a couple of years but was not widely known about. It was the only the massive success of the later film that prompted distributors to release About Elly in the U.S. just last year.
The plot here is comparatively simple but, as it turns out, no less sophisticated. A group of four couples with a few children are on a road trip and manage to find a place to stay in a dilapidated villa on the shores of the Caspian Sea. Though there is no explicit exposition, we infer through their interactions that most of them are an established group of friends and one of the married women, Sepideh, has invited a new girl Elly to join them. She’s a teacher to her daughter and Sepideh hopes to matchmake her with a member of their group, Ahmad, who divorced recently. Tragedy strikes however when one of the children nearly drowns while Elly was supposed to watch over them and the group later realizes that Elly is missing. They are forced to work out what happened and in the process find out who Elly really is.
About Elly was obviously made on a much lower budget than A Separation. It is, at its heart, only a group of actors and actresses interacting in a single location, a villa so run-down that you’d find it difficult to believe that anyone would stay there on holiday. The result however is a textbook example of how a great director can do so much with so little. With seemingly casual skill, Farhadi teases out the relationships and characteristics of his characters so that despite the immense cultural gulf their distinctive personalities shine through. The sequence in which they frantically search for the boy in the water is a marvel of keeping the audience in as panicked a state as the characters while also ensuring that you’re perfectly aware of everything that is going on. This makes me think Farhadi could be a fantastic action movie director if he wanted to be one.
As in A Separation, the drama is used to draw out the peculiarities of the culture in Iran. It’s a culture that would be alien to most of us, I think, with its emphasis on propriety and honor. Most of the conflict here actually stems from the fact that so many of the characters choose to lie rather than tell the truth, a plot element that would be annoying in many other stories. Yet here it is justified by how the absolute truth is a far lesser priority than preserving the rules that govern interactions between men and women and to preserve honor and reputation. More generally, the film displays great psychological insight as when the characters examine each word and action that they might have said or done that could have inadvertently offended Elly and driven her away. You can also see from the social dynamics how the group of friends is an established circle with relaxed rules of conduct between them while Elly remains an outsider however much they try to pretend that she is a friend.
Overall I think I still like A Separation more for its more complex plot and its higher level of polish but in many ways, About Elly is the film with the rawer, more intense emotions. Both are modern masterpieces of drama and I’m made aware all over again how Iran consistently manages to produce fantastic cinema all out of proportion to its size and cultural heft.