☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Fireworks
Wednesday (2006) – A. Farhadi
A young bride-to-be is exposed to real
married life when she is hired to serve as a maid for a squabbling couple. As with Farhadi’s later dramas (About Elly, A
Separation, The Past), there is a mystery here.
The wife suspects the husband of having an affair. Young Rouhi is caught in the middle. Farhadi only offers us (and her) sketchy bits
of information about what is going on.
We have to construct the narrative ourselves and often for a moment, we
might expect something different might happen than what actually does. This is great movie-making -- and the
anti-thesis of the Spielberg/Hitchcock suspense tradition in which everyone
sees the same heavily manipulated movie.
This is not to say that Farhadi doesn’t know exactly what he is doing –
like his colleagues Kiarostami and Panahi, he is playful but also uses cinema
to raise serious issues. The fireworks
of the title (before New Year’s) are seen at night in what must be a slice of
reality (filmed on the streets) but they are also symbolic of the couple’s
fiery relationship, which of course is fiction.
Hard to know whether the young bride’s dream of married life (and her
partner) are fiction or reality – but Farhadi seems to be giving her an
eye-opening.
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