Le passé (Asghar Farhadi, 2013)

Le Passé is neither a morality tale, nor a political allegory, nor a philosophical exposé. In the realm of conventional cinema, a film functions like Horace’s sugar-coated pill: it instructs as it entertains. A conventional film shows life with certain elements imposed on it, so that we can deduce an ultimate ‘essence’, a ‘meaning’. Le Passé only confuses: it casts us into the extremely complicated lives of a group of people surrounding Marie (Bérénice Béjo), an employee of a Parisian pharmacy, and then abandons us there. It has no essence, no meaning, just like life, pure and simple
Farhadi has designed Le Passé so that we are led to roam endlessly in it. It would be naïve to imagine the film as a didactic attempt to persuade us against judging others or to prove to us that morality is relative.

 Le Passé is thus not the ‘drama-mystery’ that its IMDb page suggests. It is a film about the duplicity of conventional cinema, which has perpetuated the illusion that in life there are always lines dividing good and evil; past, present, and future; truth and reality. What Farhadi has captured with his camera is beyond what we are accustomed to referring to as ‘film’. He has embarked on a daring, radical detour into what we might call ‘meta-cinema’. He has blocked every way towards a conventional understanding, so that we are left only one exit: What if we go against the precepts of Plato, of Aristotle, of Horace and Sir Philip Sydney? What if we don’t use an untrue story to depict a universal truth, or a transcendental idea? What if, instead of a sugar-coated pill, we show neither pill nor sugar? What would happen then?