Critic's Notebook

Carole Bethuel

In the five years since winning the Grand Prix at Cannes for “A Hero,” Asghar Farhadi has spent considerable time in the headlines. Far less publicized than the plagiarism accusations brought against him by his former student Azadeh Masihzadeh was the eventual court ruling clearing him of wrongdoing. Back in Cannes with “Parallel Tales,” the Iranian filmmaker appears eager to confront the controversy head-on — not by denying the porous relationship between art and lived experience, but by dramatizing it.

Mr. Farhadi’s second French-language feature revolves around stories and their distortions: people and their fictionalized counterparts, reality and the narratives imposed upon it, the strange feedback loop through which observation begins shaping behavior itself. The film is less concerned with plagiarism in any legal sense than with the uneasy instability of authorship. Who owns a story once it enters the world? At what point does interpretation become theft? And can a person remain unchanged after seeing themself transformed into a character?

The first figure we encounter is Adam (Adam Bessa, a dead ringer for Tahar Rahim), who is shaken awake inside a homeless shelter and promptly expelled into the street. He farebeats on the Metro, though seemingly out of necessity rather than defiance, and moments later chases down a pickpocket to recover a stranger’s wallet. No good deed goes unpunished, however, and Adam soon finds himself questioned by police. To repay the favor, the victim, Céline (India Hair), buys him a Metro ticket and refers him to her aunt, Sylvie (Isabelle Huppert), a novelist who’s preparing for an impending move and could use an extra set of hands.

Sylvie lives in partial retreat from the modern world. Though she owns a laptop, she still keys in on a typewriter. She eats tuna directly from the can because she refuses to cook with a microwave. From her apartment window, Sylvie spies on neighbors across the street through a telescope, inventing names and details for people she has never met. Three foley artists working in a nearby studio unwittingly become the subjects of her new manuscript. Mr. Farhadi stages these scenes with a lightly salacious observational rhythm, though the amusement gradually gives way to something more disquieting. Sylvie’s casual trespasses begin to feel less like writerly curiosity than entitlement masquerading as imagination.

Concerned about the wellbeing of one of her muses, Sylvie sends Adam – who has absorbed her methods like a sponge – across the street to knock on the man’s door. The errand somehow gives Adam a sort of carte blanche. What begins as a small intrusion escalates into an increasingly invasive investigation into the real people who have inspired Sylvie’s characters. The film keeps generating suspense around Adam’s behavior — his persistence, his boundarylessness, the unnerving ease with which he inserts himself into strangers’ lives — while simultaneously insisting that he poses no real threat whatsoever.

When an unsuccessful meeting with her publisher Laurence (Catherine Deneuve) causes Sylvie to abandon the manuscript, Adam salvages it and passes it off as his own. But rather than shop it around, he delivers it directly to Nita (Virginie Efira), the real-life basis for one of Sylvie’s characters. Throughout the manuscript, Sylvie has also repurposed details from her own life nearly verbatim: anecdotes, arguments with Céline, even a tidbit about accidentally cutting herself on broken glass.

What unsettles Nita is the invasion of her privacy. Her colleagues Nico (Vincent Cassel) and Théo (Pierre Niney) react with varying combinations of anger, bemusement and reluctant identification, gradually internalizing traits assigned to their fictional counterparts. Mr. Farhadi suggests that stories do not merely interpret reality but can begin reorganizing it, with people unconsciously conforming to narratives placed upon them.

The film’s underlying thesis unmistakably echoes Mr. Farhadi’s own public defense during the plagiarism case: every story is, to some extent, drawn from reality, filtered through subjectivity and transformed through interpretation. Certainly, no artist creates in a vacuum. Yet because “Parallel Tales” functions so transparently as a kind of self-justification, its dramatic tensions often feel strategically misplaced.

Adam is clearly intended as a fundamentally decent, moral figure despite behavior that repeatedly registers as naive, erratic and at times borderline psychotic. But Mr. Farhadi declines to meaningfully interrogate the discomfort the character generates. Instead, the film seems determined to preemptively acquit him, draining scenes of the moral volatility they might otherwise possess. The one transgression the film does unequivocally condemn, meanwhile, lands with surprisingly little force — especially coming from a filmmaker whose greatest works have derived their devastating power from the impossibility of easy moral self-exoneration.