best movie i've ever seen.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Estranged husband arrives from Tehran to give wife her Paris divorce. There, he meets her current - younger - boyfriend de jour. Also the man's son, as well as his wife's daughters by previous marriages. For reasons that are never quite determined, the woman has bounced around a bit. Of course, commitment is always demanding, and adjusting to another culture only adds to the difficulty. Gradually, secrets emerge about the older daughter's fury, and the boyfriend's comatose wife. Not a fun film, but well acted from an intelligent, adult script. Shot in suburbs far from touristy Paris. Nice to see Iranians not cast as terrorists or zealots.

I wasn't surprised when I read the Iranian director, Asghar Farhadi, for this movie, Le Passe ("The Past") was the same as "A Separation". Farhadi has excellent talent, and this movie was close to as good as his earlier movie mentioned. I am now a fan. The movie is a bit slow to start but draws you in to it's deep storyline and has you hooked halfway. It's layers of problems are several-deep, and there's a feeling of a real mess, authentic tragedy. At the core though, the filmmaker has made a standout tale of caution for the scope of damage that affairs can cause from children to of course those who are cheated upon. (spoilers) Not always, but as it ought to be, final scenes in movies should be the most memorable. Many movies may not be able to achieve that, but this one does. Highly Recommended - 8/10

The plot of THE PAST (LE PASSÉ) is relatively straightforward: Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) returns from Tehran to Paris to prepare for his divorce from Marie Brisson (Bérénice Bejo), but finds himself gradually drawn into familial troubles with Marie's boyfriend Samir (Tahar Rahim) and Marie's sixteen-year-old daughter Lucie (Pauline Burlet).The film can be treated as an incredibly sophisticated whodunit, as Ahmad tries to discover why Lucie hates her mother, and becomes involved in a web of intrigue that focuses on why Samir's wife Céline (Aleksandra Klebanska) ended up in a coma. Everyone tells their version of the truth, but they do not explain everything. The action offers a series of revelations that not only tell us what happened, but why it happened: everyone, it seems, was jealous of everyone else in a love-quarter involving Marie Brisson, Céline, Lucie, and Samir, as well as illegal worker Naima (Sabrina Ouazani), who becomes unwittingly drawn into the action.Yet director Farhadi is much more interested in his characters' state of mind. As in his earlier work such as A SEPARATION and ABOUT ELLY, he makes considerable use of interior shots of the characters driving their cars; this not only suggests a kind of insulation (both mental as well as physical) from the outside world, but also a continual restlessness, an unwillingness (or is it inability) to face up to themselves. This is especially true in LE PASSÉ, where Marie Brisson and Samir plan to get married, with little concern for the effect that it might have on their children.As the action unfolds, so it becomes clear that every single character is imprisoned by their respective pasts. However much they might try to escape - by marriage, or moving to another country, or simply running away (like Lucie) - they will always have to face the day of reckoning. Whether they are able to negotiate this process is another story. They would rather pursue lives of continual action: work, household chores, eating out. But Farhadi will not let his characters off the hook so easily; his camera focuses on their expressions in almost forensic detail - making us understand the mental and physical strain they experience. LE PASSÉ is an incredibly intense experience to watch; there is no music to alleviate the tension, and the camera refuses to give us any relaxation - through panning shots, or lengthy tracking shots. Instead Farhadi makes continual use of the close-up and two-shot, forcing us to consider the characters' behavior and relate it to our own lives. What would we do if we were faced with Ahmad's or Lucie's dilemmas?The film comes to some kind of resolution in the end, but still no real questions concerning the protagonists' lives have been answered. Many of them are doomed to lives of perpetual loneliness through their inability to communicate either emotionally or literally.LE PASSÉ is quite simply a modern classic - a brilliant piece of film-making by a master director.

An Iranian man named Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) arrives in France to sign the divorce papers to his French former wife, Marie (played by Berenice Bejo, who was lovely as Poppy in The Artist). He is surprised that Marie wants him to stay in her house instead of booking him into a hotel. But he is more surprised when he learns that he will share that house not only with Marie and her three children (from a previous marriage), but also with her current lover, the Arab Amir (Tahar Rahim). Soon Ahmad learns that Marie's elder daughter, Lucie (Pauline Burlet) hates her, blaming her for the attempted suicide of Amir's wife, who is in a coma. Not going to tell more about the plot, but we are less than halfway into the film, and many more shocking revelations will occur.This is the fourth film by Iranian director Asghar Farhadi that I have seen (after A Separation, About Elly, and Fireworks Wednesday). All his movies have a remarkably similar structure. We have a few people interacting, usually representing different social classes (or cultures and nationalities, as in this film). Then, halfway into the movie something happens that sheds light, as in a psychodrama and after very heated discussions, the dark secrets and lies of the protagonists.To me, this film, despite its acclaim at the Cannes film festival, is less accomplished than his previous films. One reason I didn't like this film so much is the fact that the protagonist, Marie, is so relentlessly unlikeable. In past movies, all characters have, despite their flaws, a deep humanity. But here Marie is thoroughly unappealing, selfish, self- centered, manipulative, immature, angry. There is nothing likable about her, but we have to share her antics for more than two hours. This is not a criticism of Bejo's acting, since she plays very well a very unsympathetic character.