Iran's Asghar Farhadi bends his own cinematic rules in Cannes entry 'Parallel Tales'

Two-time Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi allowed himself to go outside his cinema red lines and play with structure in his Paris-set drama "Parallel Tales," he told Reuters ahead of its Cannes Film Festival premiere on Thursday.

"There is a more formal playfulness and things that I hadn't done in my other films ... Things that were previously a red line for me. I wouldn't do them at all," he said.

"But here, in the structure of the film, I did them. From this perspective, it was a very valuable experience," said the filmmaker who has been living outside Iran since 2023.

"Parallel Tales," whose cast includes Isabelle Huppert and Vincent Cassel, is Farhadi's fifth time competing for the festival's Palme d'Or top prize.

He won the Berlin Film Festival's top prize in 2011 for "A Separation," which went on to win the Oscar for best foreign language film, becoming the first Iranian movie to win that award.

He won the same Oscar five years later with "The Salesman," though he boycotted the ceremony in protest against the travel ban affecting several Muslim-majority countries during U.S. President Donald Trump's first presidential term.

MASTER OF PRECISION

"Parallel Tales" follows a thief with no place to call his own, played by Adam Bessa, whose good deed lands him a position helping out a reclusive writer (Huppert) who dreams up a sordid story about the people working in a sound studio across the street, played by Cassel, Virginie Efira and Pierre Niney.

The thief takes a manuscript of her story and presents it as his own to one of the studio workers, who, by sharing it with the others, tangles them all up in a tale of spying and distrust.

"We were expecting a master, and he was really impressive the way he was according so much attention to every detail," said Niney, recalling how Farhadi put drops of water on the costumes himself to ensure they looked as wet as he wanted.

"And that was like this during the whole process. He had such a precise idea of what he wanted."

-Reporting by Francesca Halliwell, Writing by Miranda Murray, Editing by Rod Nickel/Reuters