For most of About Elly, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s newly distributed film (originally released in Iran in 2009 and only now in limited release around the U.S.), the audience and characters are waiting for a body to wash ashore or for that body to walk back into frame, alive and well. More than a body, this film is about a morality slowly being uprooted. It’s about the bruise of original sin and the chronic pain it inflicts on every individual and relational fiber. It’s about the quickened darkness at the heart of a community.
Yet before the moral bleakness arrives, the film starts with quite an easy tone. It’s like the Iranian version of The Big Chill (Goldblum not included). A group of old college friends are traveling to the sea for a weekend trip. From the first primal out-the-car-window screams of a needed beach getaway to the ebullient dancing and singing of a historied group of friends, the audience is shoved into the joys of a tight-knit community.
Immediately, the audience is clued in that one member of the group, Elly, is not like the others. Sepineh, the woman who has planned the trip, has brought her daughter’s teacher along with them to set Elly up with the newly divorced Ahmad. Elly’s marginal relationship to the group serves as a lens into the social dynamics of a typical middle-class Iranian community. Farhadi uses the specifics of this cultural setting to press deeper into the universal moral structure that shapes human communities.
Farhadi, as cinematic psychologist, taps into the common experience of anyone who have ever been part of a camaraderie-bordering-on-tribal group. The group analyzes the outsider, Elly. It makes half-formed, even idle observations about her. All the while it constructs a group-approved identity for her by keeping her outside the circle, where she is unable to represent her honest, true self. The film uses these common, seemingly innocuous tendencies of friends to sympathize the audience with the group. Elly is not merely isolated from them but from the audience too.
Visually, the community is further emphasized by how Farhadi and his cinematographer Hossein Jafarian use their camera. They often either cram all or most of the characters in the same frame or allow it to move from one character to the next in a single take, constantly focusing then refocusing on different characters and conversations. The communal claustrophobia is also heightened by the choice to have this film take place in a single location. The villa they rent hasn’t been used in quite some time. Window panes are broken. Dust covers every inch of carpeting and furniture. It’s cold, clammy, and a prescient symbol of the communal and moral despair to come.
What appears to be a jaunty beachside retreat will soon turn sour, and the film pivots into suspense when Elly is discovered missing. None of the characters know if she has drowned at sea or has merely left the beach resort. (This transition is perfectly timed, as many of the characters beforehand have made specific mention of the sea’s peacefulness.) Again, this film is not about the specific body per say, but about what the absence of that body represents.
About Elly is a fable of consequence, an investigation into communal obligation and morality. Just like a community is a web of people, it is also an entanglement of their flaws, their sins, and their proclivities to deceitfulness, violence, frustration, and destruction. When Elly goes missing, the group begins to investigate their earlier exchanges and actions.
All throughout the film, Farhadi makes us witness missed conversations, small white lies, and half-truths very familiar to any social group. Yet once the tragedy strikes, these seemingly tiny moral qualms are shown to be the foundational layers of an expanding, slipperier deceit. In the group’s moral panic, some begin to turn on the others, blaming each other, resorting to physical violence, yelling, and secret conversations.
At one point a group of divers comes back from looking for Elly at sea. As the group protests that they must keep looking, one of the searchers says that the sea has become too heavy and muddy. So has the relative morality of this group of friends. By following each individual, we identify with all, yet that just implicates us even more as they are all shown to be equally bent.
The sea is an oft-used metaphor for the journey of life, humans sailing valiantly upon capriciously natured waves. About Elly twists this metaphor, characterizing the sea as a moral quagmire. We don’t sail the murky, heavy deeps. We are those deeps. Most of the still, introspective shots in this film are of people gazing toward the sea. They watch the waves like the audience watches their relationships. How will the tide change with the wind? What lies beneath? Is the truth able to be found amongst the darkness?