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ABOUT ELLY

Asghar Farhadi Iran, 2009
The film lacks any non-diegetic music, so Farsi banter and crashing waves predominate on the soundtrack, and editing instills the film with anxious rhythms. A white lie daisy chain unravels amid gendered debates over etiquette, all of it incisive, all of it banal.
February 9, 2017
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...I'll suggest here that Farhadi's conceptual parameters are even broader, drawing not only on blue-chip cinematic touchstones, but also on a classic of British literature. If About Elly reimagines Antonioni's film, it also offers – somewhat like Amy Heckerling's Clueless – a loose retelling of Jane Austen's great novel Emma.
September 15, 2015
I like Farhadi's movies quite a lot. They're arithmetically moral. Every choice adds up — or, given the tragedies under his belt, subtracts. But he prefers characters to explain what the camera — what his camera, anyway — cannot. Here and in his most recent, most ornate film, The Past, this leads to a blitz of last-minute exposition and confessions that are engrossing on the one hand and somewhat inadequate on the other.
April 24, 2015
Asghar Farhadi: Life and Cinema (book)
About Elly (Darbareye Elly), one of Farhadi's true masterpieces, was lauded at the time of its release in 2009 and re-appraised further in 2011 and 2012 following the success of A Separation. And rightly so: the film... is a tightly structured screenplay subtly critical of that tier in society, operating within a Hitchcockian narrative logic, framed and shot with rarefied vision, and following a taut, kinetic rhythm.
April 10, 2015
This superb ensemble drama, nearly the equal of Farhadi's Oscar-winning "A Separation," must be seen, but with as little prior knowledge as possible. Farhadi and his editor Hayedeh Safiyari are masters of withholding information until the suspense becomes almost unbearable. "About Elly" shows that the ethical dilemmas of ordinary adults can, with this level of talent, become as gripping as any thriller.
April 9, 2015
Farhadi is a masterful director of actors, and here he gets a range of precise, vivid performances from a cast that also includes Golshifteh Farahani, Peyman Moadi ("A Seperation"), Mani Haghighi and Shahab Hosseini. It might be argued that Farhadi doesn't have any grand message, or "world vision" as he puts it. But to me, his way of revivifying cinema, and connecting its spaces to those of human hearts and minds, is vision aplenty.
April 8, 2015
The pace accelerates [when Elly goes missing] and the web of evasions and lies becomes as compelling as in any great suspense movie. We might not care about any of the characters—it's doubtful that Farhadi wants us to—but it's difficult to escape the implication that their situation reflects that of their entire society and, in many ways, our own.
April 7, 2015
In theory, this sounds stiflingly thematic, but Farhadi, after only a handful of films, is already a master of physicalizing politics, of enfolding cultural constrictions into the texture of the actors' movements within their setting. These gifts are on particular display in the film's incredible central set piece, which involves a near drowning that belatedly sets the plot in motion.
April 5, 2015
What is it that sets Farhadi apart? I would say that one of the things is his patience. This is where he is in line with Ibsen, who carefully and meticulously set up the extenuating circumstances of his plays: here are the people, here is what they do for a living, here is their world, here is how they operate in "peaceful times." We need all that information given to us, so that when the crisis comes, we can see the edifice cracking, the building falling once the structure loses its stability.
April 4, 2015
It's of a piece with Farhadi's aversion to ‘force-feeding' his audience that, apart from a plangent ‘Song for Elly' over the final credits, he makes no use of music to direct the mood of the action, relying instead on script, lighting, camera technique and the skills of his ensemble cast to convey what he intends.
September 14, 2012
It's easy to see About Elly as a film criticising the culture of deception in Iranian society, but Farhadi keeps such political commentary as subtext. First and foremost, his film is a gripping human drama, one that poses serious moral questions while challenging our preconceptions at every turn.
September 13, 2012
Film Lounge
Screaming out loud for fun in a road tunnel, flying a kite on the beach, and just the exhilaration of being fit and young and happy with one's life and one's friends – it's heady stuff and wonderfully shot in verité style. It feels like reality we are watching, while also looking like a perfectly choreographed dance. So when a disaster happens, things begin to unravel, and a secret about Elly known only to Sepideh begins to surface, it hits the audience that much harder.
June 6, 2009