The colossal success of A Separation has triggered an interest in director Asghar Farhadi's back catalogue and now his previous work, from 2009, has come to the UK. It is a really absorbing picture, powerfully acted, disturbing and suspenseful. Like A Separation it challenges the sexual politics of contemporary Iran and further shows how different Farhadi is from the older generation of Iranian masters such as Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf. The points of reference for About Elly are probably more European: Polanski's Knife in the Water, Antonioni's L'Avventura; and Farhadi also has Michael Haneke's beady eye for the dynamics and symptoms of group guilt.
A group of friends – well-to-do professionals from Tehran – have gone on holiday together to the seaside, with their young children. Farhadi shows that this is a trip they have organised quite impulsively: when they arrive, there is some confusion about where they are supposed to be staying, and they have to move into a beachfront villa that happens to be vacant, but is chaotic and derelict. And there is something else. One of the party, the vivacious Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani) has invited along someone of whom they know next to nothing: a young woman called Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti), who is their children's teacher. Mischievous Sepideh is hoping to set Elly up with the single friend in their party: Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini), who is recently divorced and has just returned from a long stay doing business in Germany.
Ahmad and Elly good-naturedly see what is going on, and even go along with it, to the extent of having an intimate conversation when they go off together on an errand in the car. But Farhadi creates strange swirls and eddies of tension. The rest of the group make gigglingly raucous jokes about the impending wedding when Elly is out of the room but the ensuing discomfort – in which Sepideh appears to be a participant – appears to go beyond mere embarrassment. Eventually there is a crisis and a bizarre disappearance, and the aftermath exposes the fault lines in the group's relationship, as secrets and lies come to the surface.
About Elly confirms Farhadi's shrewd judgment of pace, dramatic technique and formal control of an ensemble cast. Anyone who admired A Separation will want to see it (one cast member of that film, Peyman Moadi, appears here) but it stands on its own as a fascinating psychological drama.