The great Indian director Satyajit Ray once remarked that, in making movies for the entire world, his responsibility was to look at the particulars of his society and find the universal. This sounds like a good formula for storytellers who aspire to international viewership, but it would seem to break down whenever they work outside their native countries. Can a director truly understand the particulars of a society he or she doesn’t know intimately? If not, can his or her finely honed sense of the universal make up for this lack of understanding? Some filmmakers working abroad have used their outsider status to their advantage, producing work that speaks to feelings of alienation that people experience everywhere. The films Michelangelo Antonioni made outside of Italy (Blow-Up, Zabriskie Point, The Passenger) exemplify this; so too do the ones that Hou Hsiao-hsien has directed outside of Taiwan (Café Lumière, Flight of the Red Balloon).
Before the wedding, Laura’s daughter, Irene, gets to know a local boy who’s about her age. They ride around on a motorcycle (nearly colliding with Paco and his wife at one point) and have the sort of vaguely reckless good time one might find in movies about young people from all over the world. While the wedding takes place in a local church, the boy takes Irene to the church’s bell tower; on the wall she notices an inscription made by her mother and Paco when they were teenagers. Apparently the two were lovers when they were young. “Everybody knows about it,” the boy asserts, but it comes as news to Irene. The revelation of Laura’s past, as seen through her daughter’s eyes, is one of the movie’s stronger moments, tapping into a universal coming-of-age experience wherein one realizes his or her parents were once reckless youths like oneself. Yet Farhadi refuses to let the moment stand in on its own—rather, he makes it portend a bigger revelation to follow. (The remainder of this review will address some of the plot twists of Everybody Knows, so readers who want to be surprised by the film may want to check out here.)
Directed by Asghar Farhadi. R, 132 min. In subtitled Spanish and Catalan. Landmark’s Century Cinema, 2828 N. Clark, 773-248-7759, landmarktheatres.com.
