‘Parallel Tales’ Review: Asghar Farhadi’s Kieślowski Dupe Fumbles Its Fact vs Fiction Story [D+]
For a filmmaker whose reputation was built on some of the most intricately written dramas of the century, Parallel Tales emerges as a strangely puzzling proposition from Asghar Farhadi. One should first acknowledge the sheer ambition behind the project. Few established auteurs willingly abandon the terrain that made them internationally celebrated, and Farhadi has repeatedly attempted to push himself outside both his linguistic and cultural comfort zones. His first film outside Iran, The Past, brought him to France, alongside Bérénice Bejo and Tahar Rahim, though the results never fully matched the emotional precision of his Iranian masterpieces. Later came Everybody Knows, the Spanish-language thriller that opened Cannes in 2018 to notably muted reactions. With Parallel Tales, Farhadi once again ventures abroad, this time undertaking perhaps his most ambitious gesture yet: a loose reinterpretation of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Love, even borrowing the unmistakable music of Zbigniew Preisner in the process.
Returning to France certainly did not complicate the casting process. The ensemble assembled here reads like a fantasy lineup of contemporary French cinema: Isabelle Huppert, Vincent Cassel, Virginie Efira, Pierre Niney, and Adam Bessa, all performers capable of anchoring films entirely on their own. Farhadi even orchestrates a brief but irresistible reunion between Huppert and Catherine Deneuve, a moment whose symbolic weight almost exceeds its narrative power.
The premise itself is undeniably thrilling. Searching for inspiration for her next novel, Sylvie begins spying on the neighbors across from her apartment, particularly a woman she names Anna, a fictional identity entirely born from her imagination. From fragments observed through windows and half-understood gestures, Sylvie invents an entire emotional ecosystem: Anna works as a sound engineer in a post-production studio alongside her husband Christophe while simultaneously engaging in a torrid affair with their boss, Pierre. When a young man named Adam enters their orbit, the fragile line separating fantasy from reality begins to collapse entirely.
What gradually emerges from this setup is less a conventional narrative than an exploration of how perception manufactures reality. Farhadi is less interested in what is objectively happening between these characters than in how stories are constructed about them, how gaps in knowledge are filled with invention, and how imagination becomes a force that actively reshapes the world it attempts to describe. In this sense, the film’s fascination with fiction naturally extends toward its most prominent formal device: sound.
Sound here is not simply a technical layer but a structural guide. Farhadi repeatedly draws attention to the idea that what we accept as “real” in cinema is often the result of careful construction in post-production, where authenticity is manufactured rather than recorded. The post-production studio setting becomes more than a workplace backdrop, turning into a conceptual space where reality is literally assembled, altered, and re-authored. It is a compelling idea, and at moments the film comes close to articulating a coherent thesis about how the audible shapes the visible, and how perception itself is always mediated.
This framework gives several actors unusually rich material to explore. Adam Bessa carries much of the film’s instability, while Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, and Pierre Niney navigate multiple layers of performance, simultaneously embodying real characters and the fictionalized projections imposed upon them. The cast approaches the material with total commitment, yet none of them truly reaches greatness here, not for lack of talent but because the screenplay never fully allows these characters to exist beyond the film’s conceptual architecture. They often feel less like fully realized individuals than like moving pieces inside an elaborate intellectual exercise.
This is where the film begins to falter. The problem is not the talent involved, nor the ambition behind adapting Kieślowski into a contemporary French setting. It is not even the story itself, which remains consistently intriguing on paper. The issue is that Farhadi seems far more fascinated by the architecture of the narrative than by the human beings trapped inside it. For a filmmaker whose greatest works were built on devastating emotional observation, this absence becomes startling. Watching Farhadi lose interest in his characters feels almost unnatural, like witnessing a virtuoso disengage from the very thing that once defined his artistry.
The film becomes increasingly absorbed by its own mechanisms, endlessly folding fiction into fiction until the emotional stakes evaporate beneath the construction. One senses Farhadi admiring the complexity of the design from afar rather than emotionally inhabiting it. The result is a film that remains intellectually stimulating at times and occasionally brilliant in isolated moments, but strangely hollow at its center.
Parallel Tales ultimately feels like a film that understands exactly how stories are built, but no longer believes in why they are told. Its ideas about perception and fabrication are precise, even elegant at times, yet they never harden into lived experience. What remains is a cinema of construction without consequence, where Farhadi’s usual moral pressure has been replaced by a fascination with form that rarely touches ground.
Grade: D+
This review is from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival where Parallel Tales had its world premiere.
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