Reviewed by Omid Arabian

In About Elly, Asghar Farhadi's fourth feature and Iran's submission for the 2010 Academy Awards, three young couples and their small children take a house on the Caspian coast for a 3-day weekend. Also along are Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini), a recent divorcé and friend of the group, and Elly (Taraneh Alidousti), an acquaintance whom they are hoping to fix up with Ahmad.

About Elly posterFarhadi (who also wrote and produced) spends a good 45 minutes introducing us to everyone as they settle into their rented villa —establishing characters, relationships, and energies with a deft touch and an observant eye for detail. For the impatient, this first chunk of the film can feel overlong and meandering; but then, without warning, the story goes into overdrive: an incident occurs culminating in a mystery that radically upsets the course of things and plunges the group into crisis mode. Every small event, every casual conversation, every offhand choice made in the first half now comes under close scrutiny and takes on unexpected significance as the travelers try to solve the mystery ... and then, failing to do so, begin to turn on each other.

The mood degenerates rapidly from idyllic to infernal as accusations fly, cracks appear and widen under the surface, and relationships show their true nature. Casual lies, cover-ups, repressed hostilities, and hidden agendas all come to light — and that's just the beginning. The ground continues to shift more and more quickly once the incident reverberates from the group's tight circle out into the outside world. The desperation level rises, allegiances morph, new lies are told to cover up or justify old ones.

About Elly: stars Golshifteh Farahani (left)Farhadi orchestrates the descent masterfully on all fronts: camerawork, editing, and sound design all mesh seamlessly, and change tone along with the story without ever becoming obtrusive. Even more impressive, he manages to withhold all judgment (even as the travelers rush headlong to judge each other's words and deeds), continually challenging the viewer to choose his own perspective. Rather than identify with any one for any length of time, I found my own allegiances shifting as regularly as the characters'.

About Elly feels radically different from the kind of films that have come out of Iran in the past 30 years-in terms of both style and subject matter. It combines elements of social verité, psychological drama, and mystery-thriller to make for a film that fully defies genre. More importantly, it examines the ethics and mores of an upper-middle-class that has rarely been depicted in Iranian cinema after the '79 revolution. But while the particular motives for deceit and the elaborate complex of social contrivance presented here may be specific to Iranian culture, what Farhadi has to say about human behavior in and out of crisis mode certainly belongs on a broader and more universal scale — and the film is sure to resonate with non-Iranian audiences.

The ensemble of actors, many of them regulars in Farhadi's films, do justice to his strong, demanding screenplay and its acutely observed characters. While it's clear that every sequence has been elaborately blocked and well-rehearsed, they manage to infuse the proceedings with a strong overall sense of naturalness and immediacy.

As Sepideh, the group's social lynchpin and the epicenter of the web of deceit, Golshifteh Farahani gives a performance that has been widely celebrated, but to my mind is actually one of the least strong points of the film — if only because it does not measure up to the self-assured, calibrated, and subdued work by the rest of the fine cast.

About Elly screened recently at UCLA's 20th Celebration of Iranian Cinema, and is slated for a theatrical release in the fall.

Omid Arabian is the Levantine Review's film editor.