After two decades of features, Iranian Oscar winner Asghar Farhadi has made one thing abundantly clear: he lives in the grey zone, and so should we.
Parallel Tales, Farhadi’s tenth film (and second in French), is a blend of Rear Window, Stranger Than Fiction, and Peeping Tom (there’s even a little Godfather in there) without any of the genre elements inherent to them. In a way, Parallel Tales is also a culmination and continuation of all Farhadi movies in its ethically dubious nature, the likes of which is meant to create a suspicious (if not judgmental) viewer who inevitably finds themselves double-taking on their initial convictions about the five central characters: a writer who spies on her neighbors for novelistic inspiration; an immigrant she takes under her wing who does the same; two brothers who work as foley artists for films; and one of their wives who works with them.
The characters of Parallel Tales are constantly crossing between dreams, written stories, and reality, a storytelling process meant to muddy who’s who, what’s constructed, and what’s actually happening. Needless to say, it takes at least an hour to get a grip on the winding 140-minute picture, which was inspired by Krzysztof Kieślowski’s sixth part of Dekalog, which the director expanded into feature form in A Short Film About Love.
Sylvie (Isabelle Hupert) is a cranky, voyeuristic 60-something novelist living alone in a Parisian apartment that’s belonged to her family for decades. With her father’s telescope, she spies on Nita (Virginie Efira), whose real name is Anna, through her window across the street as she works with two brothers, Cristophe and Pierre, aka Théo (Pierre Niney) and Nicolas (Vincent Cassel), in a foley studio recording sound design for films. In her imagination, Nita is an object of desire for both brothers, whose relationship begins to sour when one of them sleeps with her after a night working late in the studio. In reality, Pierre and Anna are married, and Théo is in love with his older brother’s wife. In both stories, heartbreak and irrational drama mimic each other, but with drastically different results.
Meanwhile, Adam (Adam Bessa) is the morally upstanding, houseless 30-something who retrieves a woman’s wallet after it’s been stolen and, through a chain of resulting events, ends up living with Sylvie in her apartment as her assistant. It isn’t long before he takes to the same lascivious creeper tendencies as Sylvie in order to write his own novel without Sylvie knowing. He soon starts following Anna in hopes that he can share Sylvie’s story, plainly stalking her on a near-daily basis to set up interactions that might lead to being able to share Sylvie’s novel with her as if it were his. At first she’s mildly charmed and assuredly unthreatened, but as it continues and Adam won’t cede her request to stop, the stakes rise.
The drudge of narrative confusion is ambitious––at times tedious, other times teeming with a peculiar mystery that sucks you in––but the score (a plucked violin soaked in way too much reverb trading places with an overtly sentimental piano that clashes with the tone of the film), blasé cinematography, and uninspired editing leave much to be desired. Farhadi tries to be funny and Huppert occasionally makes it work (e.g. using a toaster to light her cigarette), but the comedic element is disparate and half-baked. Yet to Farhadi’s credit, his and Massoumeh Lahidji’s dialogue, which serves as the engine of moral ambiguity that powers the story, has the strength to keep one’s attention for the lengthy runtime if they’re able to invest.
Black-and-white ethics have never had a place in a Farhadi film. The writer-director has built his career on shaping work in the way we experience life. He removes omniscience and plays into the reality we all face of only ever having a partial (as opposed to God-like) understanding of the stories unfolding in our lives or personal histories. We learn something devastating about Sylvie’s past and think we understand what’s going on, only to later learn it’s not true at all, which changes how we perceive everything. We make our judgments, thinking we have all the details now, only to learn we still only have half the story, and there’s something else to consider. Then it happens again, and again, and so on.
That narrative device is the main thing keeping Parallel Tales alive, but we’ve come to expect more than just a prudent puzzle from Farhadi, and rightly so. Like any great director, he’s set the bar high for himself, and every successive feature will have to hurdle it. Parallel Tales can’t make the leap it attempts, but it’s not dismissible either. As always, Huppert, Cassel, and Efira deliver memorable performances that the movie would be relatively empty without. It doesn’t hurt to have a little Catherine Deneuve cameo, either, in one of two titles at Cannes this year.
Parallel Tales premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.