Parallel Tales: Asghar Farhadi plays with ideas of artistic voyeurism in a frustratingly opaque French-language drama

• Reviewed from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival 

It’s difficult to position Parallel Tales within the body of work of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi. In this French-language drama, the coherence of his best-known films, A Separation (2011) and The Salesman (2016), makes way for elaborate metatextual gaming.  

Following on from his Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz-starring thriller Everybody Knows (2018), the director’s 10th film marks another European detour for an artist whose cinema wears its European influences proudly – Georges Simenon is a named touchstone. Here Farhadi journeys to Paris for a textured exploration of voyeurism, authorship and the queasy overlap between fiction and reality.  

Loosely inspired by Krzysztof Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Love (1988) (with an additional nod to another Kieślowski, A Short Film About Killing (1988)), Parallel Tales equally borrows from Rear Window (1954) in its fascination with spying and projection. Despite these formidable references, virtuoso filmmaking techniques, and an exceptional cast, the film is more provocative than transportive, more enjoyable to dissect after viewing than it is to watch. 

The appealingly cantankerous Sylvie, played by Isabelle Huppert, lurks at the centre of this narrative labyrinth. Once a respected novelist, Sylvie now lives alone in an extravagantly cluttered Paris apartment, clattering at an ancient typewriter, among mountains of books, ashtrays, and mice, while her literary clout dwindles. Hungry for inspiration and relevance, she points a telescope at the apartment building across the street, where she observes the lives of three residents: Nicolas, Theo and Nita, played respectively by Vincent Cassel, Pierre Niney and Virginie Efira. The trio work together in a sound studio, crafting foley effects for films, miraculously recreating footsteps and rustling leaves, the same movie alchemy that was mined so effectively by Ann Oren’s Piaffe (2022). 

This detail becomes the film’s soundest and most effective metaphor. Sylvie cannibalises fragments of observed behaviour into melodramatic fiction. In her imagination, the neighbours become participants in a lurid erotic triangle, marred by betrayal and violence. Adjacent to this fantasy runs the far less sensational truth of their everyday lives: deadlines, commutes and backache. A competing autobiographical subplot, concerning the martial woes of Sylvie’s parents, provides another salacious (and sometimes confusing) graft. 

The boundaries between invention and reality begin to blur once Sylvie’s unpublished manuscript falls into the wrong hands. The catalyst is Adam, an ex-convict played by Adam Bessa, introduced (initially at least) as a poetic adventurer. After retrieving Sylvie’s niece’s stolen bag on the Métro, Adam is hired to help clear out Sylvie’s apartment. Fascinated by her process, he steals the discarded manuscript and presents it to Nita as his own writing. The impact is destabilising, then devastating. Nita immediately recognises herself in the pages, and as the other characters begin reading the novel, fiction starts to bleed into reality. Relationships shift, suspicions grow, and concocted dynamics begin manifesting in the real world. 

One can’t help but wonder if the legal furore over the authorship of the director’s 2021 feature, A Hero, planted the seeds for this meditation on artistic ethics. Farhadi pokes around the notion that observing another person may be a violation. Can writers claim innocence if their inventions wound the people who inspired them? 

Between Zbigniew Preisner’s production design and Saeed Farhadi’s layered script, Parallel Lives also ponders broader questions about fabrication in cinema with a jumble of tools and props, particularly in its playful use of the spyglass point-of-view.  

But Farhadi’s material eventually collapses under the weight of its ideas and illusions. At nearly two hours and twenty minutes, the film circles variations on the same themes. Even skilled editor Hayedeh Safiyari cannot find an urgent rhythm and so the strands of Farhadi’s intricate narrative web rarely tighten into jeopardy or suspense. Despite all the Hitchcockian voyeurism, it lacks erotic charge and the intersections with Kieślowski’s workfall short of the Polish director’s spiritual questing. 

More frustratingly, the behaviours on screen feel driven less by character than screenplay mechanics. Actors as gifted as Cassel and Niney appear constrained the film’s conceptual architecture. Huppert consistently cuts through the fog, delivering a performance that moves between sniping intellect and bag-lady weariness. Her scenes with Catherine Deneuve, who appears too briefly as Sylvie’s jaded publisher, bring some much-needed crackle. 

For all the flaws, there are moments when it approaches the moral clarity associated with Farhadi’s finest work. The plot may be overextended and frustratingly opaque, but it is rarely dull. Like the artificial sounds fashioned by its foley artists, Parallel Tales reminds the audience that realism itself is merely another confection.