Ali Benzekri

The result is a film that contains nearly everything adolescence can hold: desire, embarrassment, friendship, cruelty, harassment, loneliness, tenderness, and fleeting moments of connection. Yet what lingers is neither nostalgia nor melancholy. It is the feeling of having spent time with people rather than characters. By the end of La Gradiva, Atlan has achieved something deceptively difficult. She has made observation feel like drama.

The film is undeniably demanding: slow, resistant, and often withholding. It rarely offers explanation or narrative relief, leaving connections implied but never stated. But this difficulty is structural. It is built around dynamics rather than events, around how people adjust to one another in real time and negotiate power through proximity alone.

Parallel Tales ultimately feels like a film that understands exactly how stories are built, but no longer believes in why they are told. Its ideas about perception and fabrication are precise, even elegant at times, yet they never harden into lived experience. What remains is a cinema of construction without consequence, where Farhadi’s usual moral pressure has been replaced by a fascination with form that rarely touches ground.

At only 77 minutes, Full Phil disappears before its looseness becomes exhausting. By the end, the movie starts resembling Phil himself: swollen, awkward, overloaded with nervous energy, and barely functioning logic. It never fully settles into a coherent shape, but it remains strangely difficult to look away from.