Asghar Farhadi’s ‘Parallel Tales’ Panned at Cannes— 25% on Rotten Tomatoes

Critics are really having it out for Asghar Farhadi’s “Parallel Tales” here at Cannes. It’s getting trounced in almost every review. Will we get a worse reviewed competition title this year? I have my doubts.

So far, we’ve got pans from Variety, IndieWire (C-), Screen, THR, and The Wrap. The only positive review comes from Deadline, which tends to like everything it sees (there’s a reason it’s known for carrying water for every major studio). Overall, 25% on Rotten Tomatoes.

The ire might have something to do with “Parallel Tales” being a loose remake of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Dekalog VI,” an almost impossible task in itself, especially given that it was already reworked by Kieślowski into the 86-minute feature “A Short Film About Love.”

“Parallel Tales” is, of course, set in Paris rather than Poland, and features an impressive French cast including Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, Catherine Deneuve, Pierre Niney, and Adam Bessa.

Farhadi’s psychological drama is built around Isabelle Huppert’s character Sylvie, a famous but creatively blocked novelist who begins spying on her neighbors across the street for inspiration. Things take a turn when Sylvie hires a young assistant (Adam Bessa), and the stories she invents about the people she watches begin bleeding into real lives, blurring the line between fiction and reality.

It’s a moral puzzle where small acts of deception generate increasingly implausible consequences, and no character remains unaffected. Despite the film’s self-serious tone, it often veers into something almost silly, as convoluted twist after convoluted twist piles up.

In a January 2024 interview, Farhadi said he would no longer make films in Iran, calling it an act of resistance against what he described as the country’s “repressive” regime. “Parallel Tales” was intended as his next step, but it appears to fare no better than his last non-Iranian film, “Everybody Knows,” a Spanish-language mystery starring Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz that was widely seen as underwhelming.

Farhadi has previously made only one other film outside Iran—“The Past” (France). He is best known for his emotionally intense Iranian dramas, including “About Elly,” “A Separation,” “The Salesman,” and “A Hero.” Whether he returns to Iran remains uncertain, but his strongest work has generally been rooted in Iranian settings rather than international productions.