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 Real-life couple Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem star in the
Spanish-language movie written and directed by the double-Oscar
winner Iranian Asghar Farhadi, about a Spanish village hit by a
terrible crime.
Cruz plays Laura, who leaves her husband behind in Argentina for
a trip with their son and daughter to a family wedding in the
village where she grew up. Paco, (Bardem), her former lover, is
the life and soul of the party, until things take a shocking
turn.
"It is, of course, a thriller," Farhadi told a news conference,
adding that the genre plot was more of an "excuse" - a way to
investigate the behavior of people thrust into unthinkable
circumstances.
Perhaps because of sky-high expectations for a film with A-list
actors and a director revered for critical hits "A Separation"
and "The Salesman", reviews were mixed.
"Farhadi’s weakest film yet is still better than the vast
majority of commercially made dramas in Spain, France or the
United States," wrote Variety's Chief Film Critic Peter Debruge.
While it has strong echoes of Farhadi’s breakthrough film "About
Elly" about a woman who disappears from a beach in Iran,
"Everybody Knows" is, as Bardem said, "one of the most Spanish
films a director could make".
"For me what he has done is incredible, being Iranian and making
a Spanish movie in Spanish language and there are no clichés,
it’s just incredible,” Cruz told Reuters.
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The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw said: "the southern European setting
has given Farhadi’s filmic language a new sanguine force", while
Variety's Debruge took a dimmer view.
"Farhadi’s career is starting to look suspiciously like Woody
Allen’s, as he jets off to make sunlit movies starring beautiful
people in one European country after another. Globe-trotting is well
and good, except one hopes the immensely talented auteur ... would
use the opportunity of working abroad to be a bit more provocative."
IndieWire's Eric Kohn said “Everybody Knows” veers towards the
"soapy", with a plot twist "that wouldn’t feel out of place in a
telenovela", but the film's "explosive star power" help it make
"remarkable observations about the impact of class and status under
dire circumstances".
The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 8 to May 19.
(Additional reporting by Hanna Rantala; Editing by Matthew Mpoke
Bigg)
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