The Past - QUEERGURU

Life for Marie is very fraught. Ahmed, her soon-to-be-ex husband arrives back in Paris from his native Tehran to finalise their divorce. Marie is already living with her next husband-to-be Samir a laundry owner whose current wife is still lying in a coma after a failed suicide attempt. And the ramshackle crowded household has three children including two daughters from a marriage that pre-dated the one to Ahmad, and the oldest one Lucie a rebellious teenager prefers her stepdad over her mother and her new beau and makes no effort to disguise this fact.

Ahmed’s return soon exposes the fact that his relationship with Marie still lacks closure and there is a combination of affection and resentment that still pervades. Marie still insists on testing Ahmed’s feelings like announcing just minutes before their divorce judgement that she is pregnant with Samir’s child. Samir in turn feels Ahmed’s presence is threatening to his own relationship with Marie and insists moving back to his own apartment until Ahmed leaves town, and hopefully their lives, again.

Then suddenly the whole plot takes a sudden turn and adds more than one other complex layer which shakes all their emotions up. It’s an unpredictable but rather brilliant drama with more than its fair share of twists and turns that keep you completely intrigued to the very end.

The storyteller is Asghar Farhadi the Iranian auteur that won his country’s first ever Best Foreign Picture Oscar with his spellbinding ‘A Separation’ ….. another family drama about a couple having to make difficult decisions. This new one cannot possible match this but it comes pretty close with a rather stunning performance by Bérénice Bejo as the anguished Marie which won her the Best Actress Award at Cannes.

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