Wednesday, 17 February 2016

Fireworks Wednesday (2006)


☆ ☆ ☆ ☆


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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