‘Parallel Tales’ Cannes Review: Farhadi’s Overwrought Meta-Drama Collapses Under Its Own Design

There are filmmakers who, once removed from their native terrain, seem to lose their sense of form. It already happened to Iranian director Asghar Farhadi with Everybody Knows in 2018, but nothing quite prepares for the near-total debacle that is Parallel Tales, a film that rather boldly claims inspiration from Krzysztof Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Love. It retains little from that classic beyond the basic premise of spying on neighbors and falling for one of them—a narrative mechanism that cinema has been refining for decades, with Hitchcock’s Rear Window still standing as its most precise and enduring expression.

Here, the director of A Separation uses that familiar setup to stage a kind of voyeuristic game between two houses facing each other across a narrow street. He complicates things further—at least in theory—by introducing a novelist in one of those houses, a woman who observes the lives across the way and turns them into fiction. What might have worked as a nimble 90-minute noir comedy of crossed wires instead becomes an exhausting, two-and-a-half-hour narrative loop that ultimately has very little to say—and, at a certain point, nowhere to go.

The film could easily have opened the festival, and the decision would make sense: a flawed but high-profile work by a well-known auteur, fronted by a cast of major French stars. In competition, however, a certain baseline of rigor is expected—one that Parallel Tales never quite reaches.

It begins, if not promisingly, at least pleasantly enough. Isabelle Huppert plays Sylvie, a veteran writer—disheveled, irritable, and living in a cluttered, grimy house—who spends her days observing her neighbors through a telescope, mining their lives for inspiration. What we see, in parallel, is the fiction she constructs from those glimpses.

Through her lens, she follows “Anna” (Virginie Efira), who works at a foley studio—crafting sound effects for film and television—alongside the man Sylvie assumes to be her husband (Pierre Niney) and her boss, whom she imagines as her lover (Vincent Cassel). From these fragments, Sylvie builds an old-fashioned romantic drama of betrayals and shifting alliances.

At the same time, Adam (Adam Bessa), a young homeless man who once helped Sylvie’s niece out of a dangerous situation in the Paris metro, begins to orbit her life. In an attempt to repay him, the niece hires Adam to clean Sylvie’s chaotic house, which she hopes to eventually sell. But as Adam becomes aware of Sylvie’s writing, he’s tempted to cross the boundary between fiction and reality—to seek out this “Anna” in the real world, a woman who may or may not resemble the one Sylvie has imagined. In fact, everything happening in that neighboring house may be very different from what she has written.

Up to that point, the film holds together as a mildly amusing comedy of misunderstandings—neighbors entangled in a web of misread gestures, romantic projections, and petty conflicts (with even a brief cameo by Catherine Deneuve). But from there, it strains to become a meditation on fiction and reality—one that proves far more interesting to discuss than to actually sit through, especially as it stretches on for another hour and a half of increasingly convoluted twists, now with the boundaries between the two realms blurred beyond recognition.

There is, buried within, a compelling idea: that fiction doesn’t merely distort reality but can, in some cases, reveal it—or even bring it into being. The logic behind Sylvie’s imagined narrative may be flawed, exaggerated, or built on partial information, but the telescope—the device that captures fragments of truth, like a camera—does, at times, see something real. That duality gains some weight toward the film’s conclusion.

But getting there requires enduring an exhausting chain of narrative reversals that tangle and retangle what might have been a sharper, leaner, and more effective black comedy. Farhadi seems convinced there is something deeply significant to be unearthed in these parallel stories, and he keeps pushing forward long after the film has exhausted its credibility—dragging down not only its formidable cast, but perhaps, worryingly, a portion of his own reputation as a filmmaker.