Thursday night at the Grand Théâtre Lumière, the credits rolled on Parallel Tales and the room stood up. Deadline clocked it at seven minutes. Catherine Deneuve walked over and embraced Isabelle Huppert and Farhadi. Variety’s reporter on the ground measured 5.5 minutes and watched Farhadi blow kisses to the crowd. The discrepancy is trivial; the optics aren’t. A Cannes ovation — whatever its precise duration — is a room-temperature read on a film that the critical press had already spent the day eviscerating.
That gap between the standing audience and the sitting critics is the real story here.
The Film and What It’s Doing
Parallel Tales (French title: Histoires Parallèles) is Farhadi’s 10th feature, co-written with Massoumeh Lahidji and loosely based on Kieślowski’s Dekalog: Six. Principal photography began September 8, 2025 in Paris and wrapped by early December. The editor is Hayedeh Safiyari, a recurring Farhadi collaborator.
The premise: Sylvie (Isabelle Huppert), a novelist, uses a telescope to spy on the apartment across the street. The three people she watches — Nicolas (Vincent Cassel), his brother Theo (Pierre Niney), and Nita (Virginie Efira) — are sound designers renting the space to work on a nature documentary. Sylvie can watch but cannot hear, so she invents. She imagines a torrid affair. The fiction she types bears no relationship to the reality across the avenue.
The sound design angle is where Farhadi does something genuinely original. As we watch the trio work — Nita stroking celery to mimic animals eating, Theo slapping a bowl of water to simulate footsteps in a puddle — they’re creating sounds and passing them off as other audio: making associations between things that have nothing to do with each other, not unlike the imaginative work of writers. Foley as metaphor for fiction. Both disciplines take something real and misrepresent it in the service of a more convincing lie.
Then Adam (Adam Bessa) arrives — hired to help clear out Sylvie’s apartment. He takes an interest that quickly becomes predatory. He starts spying on the neighbors himself, engineers a meeting with Nita at a local café, and presents a manuscript Sylvie had discarded as his own. Nita reads it and recognizes herself. The fiction has found its subject.
Who Made It and How
Twelve years after The Past, Farhadi is back in Paris, produced again by Alexandre Mallet-Guy of Memento Production — a relationship that stretches back to when Mallet-Guy was simply the French distributor of Farhadi’s earlier Iranian films. Mallet-Guy has now produced four consecutive Farhadi features: The Salesman, Everybody Knows, A Hero, and now this. International sales are handled by Charades; U.S. rights by UTA Independent Film Group. Anonymous Content, whose credits include Spotlight and The Revenant, co-produces from the American side.
The cast was assembled with generational breadth in mind — Huppert and Deneuve on one end, Efira and Niney on the other. Niney’s recent The Count of Monte-Cristo was France’s second-biggest box office hit of 2024 with 10 million admissions. Farhadi wasn’t casting obscure arthouse faces. He assembled the French film industry’s most recognizable generation-spanning lineup and pointed them at a moral puzzle.
The score is by Zbigniew Preisner — Kieślowski’s own composer, the man behind the music for The Double Life of Véronique and the Three Colors trilogy. Bringing Preisner in signals something more than homage. It’s an attempt to carry through not just the narrative DNA of Dekalog: Six but its emotional atmosphere — that particular quality of Catholic guilt and moral weight that Preisner’s music embodies.
Plans are reportedly in early development for all ten Dekalog chapters to be remade by different directors. Parallel Tales is the first out.
The Political Context Nobody Wanted to Ignore
Following the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s decision to mandate hijabs in film and television productions, Farhadi announced he would not direct any new film in Iran until the ban is lifted. He has been living outside Iran since 2023. In April, before the premiere, he issued a public statement calling on filmmakers to speak out against the escalation of the Iran War, writing that attacking a country’s infrastructure is a war crime — a message directed at U.S. threats against Iranian power plants and bridges.
This background matters because it shapes how Parallel Tales gets read. A director in political exile, making films in borrowed languages about people who watch others from a distance and invent stories about them — the autobiographical reading writes itself. Whether Farhadi intended it or not.
What the Critics Said — All of Them
This is where honesty requires some adjustment to the first version of this piece, which leaned almost entirely on Deadline’s review. Deadline liked the film. Almost everyone else did not.
World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy, aggregating reactions from the press screening, noted pans from Variety, IndieWire (C-), Screen International, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Wrap. The only positive review came from Deadline. World of Reel
At the time of writing, Rotten Tomatoes shows Parallel Tales at 20% — compared to 99% for A Separation, 96% for The Salesman, and even 78% for Everybody Knows, his previous non-Iranian film that was itself considered a disappointment. Rotten Tomatoes
Variety’s Owen Gleiberman was pointed: the film is “a meandering and rather amorphous mess,” a “far-out parable of voyeurism and imagination” that lacks the suspense of the Kieślowski source. “Dekalog: Six had suspense; ‘Parallel Tales’ has longueurs.” Variety
IndieWire’s David Ehrlich was more brutal: the film “forfeits the sordid humanity of Kieślowski’s masterpiece in exchange for the soapy meta-fiction of a meandering daydream,” turning A Short Film About Love into “a long film about nothing.” IndieWire
The Hollywood Reporter found craft without conviction: “elegant but frustrating,” a film that “keeps circling itself, with diminishing traction.” The critic’s central objection was structural — where Kieślowski’s tight focus on just two individuals gave the film its emotional power, Farhadi’s multi-strand approach dilutes access to every character, “limiting their dimensions.” The Hollywood Reporter
The Wrap offered the most considered partial defense: the film is “impressively acted and thematically compelling” but “avoids wholehearted recommendation due to its uneven repetition of sequences and ideas that make this feel more lugubrious than cohesive.” TheWrap
Micropsia’s critic drew the pattern explicitly: “There are filmmakers who, once removed from their native terrain, seem to lose their sense of form. It already happened to Farhadi with Everybody Knows in 2018, but nothing quite prepares for the near-total debacle that is Parallel Tales.” Micropsia
Why the Room Still Stood Up
The critic-audience divide at Cannes premieres is old and well-documented, but it’s usually not this wide. A few explanations:
First, the cast. Virginie Efira in particular gets consistent praise across the negative reviews for her work in dual roles. Watching Huppert, Cassel, Efira, Niney, and Deneuve share a screen — even in a film critics found wanting — is a different experience than reading about it afterwards. The Grand Théâtre Lumière holds 2,300 people. Most of them had not read the reviews that appeared that same morning.
Second, Farhadi’s accumulated authority. This was his first Cannes since A Hero took the Grand Prix in 2021 — five years between appearances at a festival where he has previously won the Grand Prix and competed five times total. A returning figure with that kind of record gets something that newer directors don’t: the benefit of the room’s accumulated goodwill.
Third, the atmosphere. The embrace between Deneuve, Huppert, and Farhadi after the credits was genuinely affecting — three major figures of European cinema, representing different generations and different national cinemas, meeting in front of a packed house. Cannes audiences respond to that kind of moment. It’s not dishonest. It’s just not the same thing as critical assessment.
The Harder Question
Whether Farhadi returns to Iran remains uncertain, but his strongest work has consistently been rooted in Iranian settings rather than international productions. That’s the uncomfortable through-line in the critical response. A Separation, About Elly, The Salesman — films set in specific social and legal structures that created moral pressure Farhadi could work with and against. The specificity of Iranian bureaucracy, of Iranian domestic law, of what it costs an Iranian family to lie or tell the truth — that specificity generated the moral stakes that made those films feel necessary.
Paris is more abstract for him. The apartment across the street is elegant and atmospheric, lit with “subtle golden tones” by Guillaume Deffontaines. But golden tones don’t generate the kind of pressure that made watching A Separation‘s characters navigate a housekeeper’s false accusation feel like something close to unbearable.
Variety’s Gleiberman put it plainly: “The Past was every inch a Farhadi film. It had his domestic psychodramatic intensity, and his flowing ingenuity. The new movie, by contrast, is an inflated meditation on fiction and reality.” Variety
That’s the real stakes of Parallel Tales — not whether it wins the Palme d’Or, but whether a director who built his reputation on the moral weight of a specific place and culture can find equivalent weight when that place is no longer available to him. The critics at Cannes this week largely said no. The audience in the Grand Théâtre Lumière, standing and applauding for five and a half or seven minutes depending on who was counting, said something different — or at least deferred the question.
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