Join the Washington DC Sunday Night Film Club this Sunday, May 17th at 4:05 for About Elly at the Landmark E Street Cinema . Look for Laine wearing a black and white skirt in the theatre lobby about 15 minutes before the film. As always, after the film we will descend on a local establishment for dinner/drinks/discussion.
About Elly is a terrific film written and directed by Asghar Farhadi prior to making the Academy Award-winning A Separation and The Past. It is now getting a well-deserved U.S. release, and richly repays the wait. Like Farhadis other films, it is full of subtle motivations and believable characters, building intense emotional involvement as the story unfolds. Beautiful Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani, The Patience Stone, Exodus: Gods and Kings), is a friendly young wife and mother with a tendency to stretch the truth to try to make things better. She arranges a weekend getaway to the seashore with three couples who were friends at university, with their young children, and includes Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini), the newly-divorced brother of one of them, home from Germany looking for a wife. She also invites, with considerable arm-twisting, Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti), the sweet but shy kindergarten teacher of her daughter, to get acquainted with Ahmad. Everyone is having a good time until tragedy suddenly strikes, with a mysterious disappearance. Recriminations ensue and relationships are strained. The friends try to cover up the truth, and lie piles upon lie leading to disaster. (Fully subtitled)