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Parallel Tales review – Isabelle Huppert pens furtive sexual fantasy for Vincent Cassel in Asghar Farhadi’s latest

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A sghar Farhadi is the Iranian auteur whose film-making style has always shown the high European influences of Antonioni and Haneke. He has in fact made two films in Europe: The Past in France and Everybody Knows in Spain. Now he returns to France and the French language for this diverting, middleweight meta-drama about betrayal and about a supposed link between voyeurism and creativity: do writers spy on the characters they have brought to life? It’s a riff or theme-variation on Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Love – with a twist of Hitchcock’s Rear Window – doggedly spinning a spider’s web out of itself. The result is intricate, elaborate, though a little nebulous. Isabelle Huppert is Sylvie, a cantankerous fading writer, living alone in chaotic squalor in her messy Paris apartment, rattling out novels that no one wants to read on her Olivetti electric typewriter. No new-fangled laptops here. Vincent Cassel and Virginie Efira.…

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