Parallel Tales

There is something watchable about this melodrama in which shocking events force others into being, and in which Huppert is delightfully rude to everyone in a clever way as this literary fraud plays out.

Parallel Tales (Histoires parallèles) begins as an ambitious, metatextual, multicharacter ensemble drama, with various key cast members playing dual roles. But it rambles on too long, losing much of its early charm and focus in a ponderous, undercooked second half.

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.

Loosely adapting “A Short Film About Love” into a long film about nothing, Asghar Farhadi’s cramped and tedious “Parallel Tales” forfeits the sordid humanity of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s masterpiece in exchange for the soapy meta-fiction of a meandering daydream.

The problem is that all the various strands — the parallel tales — dilute our access to the characters, limiting their dimensions.

Parallel Tales is exactly as advertised: The central story interweaves the lives of six people in ways that should be a recipe for delicious, chaotic drama. Yet, Farhadi's latest is bogged down by its repetitiveness and refusal to offer anything new to a story about imagination and voyeurism. What we’re left with hangs a little too long onto a thin rope of painful repetition, false hope, and jaded screenwriting.

Unfolds with little dramatic momentum and negligible intrigue.