There is a particularly affecting scene where Bea, suddenly forced to confront Paco and Laura's past, rushes from the bedroom to the kitchen as if to escape the confines of her marriage, only to find herself blocked off by the kitchen sink where, shaking with adrenaline, she pours a glass of water. Lennie shines as Paco's wife Bea, refusing to play into the family bullshit while at the same time caring desperately for her husband. Jealousy crops up and old desires are felt, but things are never reduced to the fictional notion of "the one". The film is honest and nuanced about how love divides and expands to include the people who come after our initial relationships, and how an old simmering connection can exist alongside equally tender relationships in the present. Laura and Paco have a persistent history, but separation and distance have worn at their ties, and in the intervening years their respective marriages have taken precedence. Most of the conflict is focused around two mirrored triangular set-ups: between Alejandro, Laura and Paco, and between Laura, Paco and his wife Bea (Barbara Lennie). With so much jealousy, deception and mistrust, the film could easily collapse into histrionics - this is the kind of story you read about in That's Life magazine - but Farhadi avoids sensationalism by making the world look ordinary and keeping the performances natural.ĭrained shades of brown and dusty green dominate, as characters move around the frame with an ease that resembles the unstudied activity of documentary. Like Farhadi's films A Separation (2011) and The Past (2013), Everybody Knows uses the contained world of the family to explore a breadth of human emotion. The kidnappers are apprised of some deeply divisive family secrets.Īt the centre of it all is Paco (Javier Bardem), Laura's childhood friend and ex-lover, who was once a servant's son but is now a winemaker with valuable land of his own. When Laura begins to receive text messages demanding a ransom, it becomes clear that Irene's disappearance was orchestrated.
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