Times Colonist movie writer Michael D. Reid is covering the Victoria Film Festival, which continues until Feb. 12. Ratings are out of five stars. Go to timescolonist.com/entertainment/film-festival for updates
What: Roommates Wanted
Where: Vic Theatre
When: Today, 1:30 p.m.
Rating: Two stars
This French ensemble comedy is as cheerfully ridiculous as Manuela (Berengere Krief), a student who, following a case of mistaken identity, somehow persuades a grumpy retired obstetrician and widower (Andre Dussollier) to let her move into one of many vacant rooms in his luxurious Paris apartment.
Unfortunately, the film is also as superficial as his unwanted new roommate and not nearly as persuasive. When two more mismatched roommates enter the picture — Marion, a high-strung nurse, and Paul-Gerard, an unstable divorce-bound lawyer — the comic contrivances pile up in a fast-paced but annoyingly formulaic and disposable comedy. Screen veteran Dussollier is amusing as the exasperated old loner who gets a new lease on life, but he’s trapped by the material and his appeal can’t compensate for the film’s one-dimensional characters and predictable plot.
What: The Salesman
Where: SilverCity
When: Tonight, 9:30 p.m.
Rating: Four stars
Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian filmmaker who won a best foreign-language-film Oscar for his 2011 domestic drama The Separation, has done it again.
His new Oscar-nominated thriller focuses on the plight of a displaced couple in Tehran — Emad (Shahab Hosseini), a schoolteacher, and his wife, Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti), who is also his co-star in a local theatre group’s production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
Forced to find a new place to live when their apartment building becomes uninhabitable, they move into a suddenly vacant flat that, initially unbeknownst to them, was previously occupied by a woman neighbours say “had a lot of acquaintances” and left under mysterious circumstances, minus her belongings.
One of the strengths of this understated Iranian drama is the deliberate vagueness Farhadi applies to circumstances surrounding an incident that sparks the film’s tension — Rana is assaulted while having a shower after buzzing in an intruder she assumed was her husband returning from the market.
It is reflective of Farhadi’s revelatory style and the cultural insight he provides that while Rana is traumatized, she is reluctant, for reasons that will become clear, to contact police and reveal specifics.
Meanwhile, cracks in the couple’s relationship become apparent when Emad obsessively attempts to find her attacker, presumably one of the former tenant’s clients, to avenge this crime.
Suffice it to say that things don’t unravel as Western audiences might expect.
Farhadi also defies expectations when the couple’s onstage action parallels their own domestic drama.
It becomes riveting, a testament to remarkable performances turned in by the leads.
