X
- 2019
- R
- Focus Features
- 2 h 13 m
- 2019
- R
- Focus Features
- 2 h 13 m
Summary Carolina, a Spanish woman living in Buenos Aires, returns to her hometown outside Madrid with her Argentinian husband and children. However, the trip is upset by unexpected events that bring secrets into the open.
Directed By: Asghar Farhadi
Written By: Asghar Farhadi
- 2019
- R
- Focus Features
- 2 h 13 m
- 2019
- R
- Focus Features
- 2 h 13 m
Everybody Knows
68
7.1
Where to Watch
Summary Carolina, a Spanish woman living in Buenos Aires, returns to her hometown outside Madrid with her Argentinian husband and children. However, the trip is upset by unexpected events that bring secrets into the open.
Directed By: Asghar Farhadi
Written By: Asghar Farhadi
Where to Watch
Top Cast
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 38 Critic Reviews
68
76% Positive
29 Reviews
29 Reviews
21% Mixed
8 Reviews
8 Reviews
3% Negative
1 Review
1 Review
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 38 Critic Reviews
68
76% Positive
29 Reviews
29 Reviews
21% Mixed
8 Reviews
8 Reviews
3% Negative
1 Review
1 Review
If there’s one nit to pick with Everybody Knows, it’s that Farhadi’s films, as excellent as they are, are starting to feel a bit same-y. He’s plying the same family-in-crisis formula he’s worked before. That formula still works like gangbusters, but it’s becoming a formula nonetheless: Happiness and community curdle into paranoia and suspicion.
The mystery becomes popcorn-chompingly compelling, each new piece of information adding shading and dimension to the true shape of the family. Nobody is above suspicion or below empathy.
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 62 User Ratings
7.1
71% Positive
44 Ratings
44 Ratings
24% Mixed
15 Ratings
15 Ratings
5% Negative
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 62 User Ratings
7.1
71% Positive
44 Ratings
44 Ratings
24% Mixed
15 Ratings
15 Ratings
5% Negative
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
Who? Why? How? The mystery unfolds and a secret is revealed as relationships between family members and between families are explored.
There are many characters and many relationships to establish, so it takes a while for the story to get started. But once the plot gets going you listening to every word and analyzing every action.
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[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]
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As is often the case with Farhadi’s films, Everybody Knows progresses as though nothing special were happening, and yet it’s all very interesting, anyway.
Farhadi’s choreography of the shift from rowdy celebration to frantic desperation is the most effective part of the movie, and he keeps the suspense going on several fronts.
Everybody Knows never quite makes the leap from engrossing to exciting. Even the story’s one big plot twist is obvious enough that many will guess it well in advance, and it doesn’t reverberate backward the way that long-buried secrets usually do in Farhadi’s work.
Farhadi’s screenplay does an artful job of keeping vital fragments of each of its characters secret until the very end. But the climate of over-determined melodrama is rather less involving: characters synopsise their grievances so often, and so thoroughly, that many pivotal scenes have the corny texture of a “previously, on last week’s show” clip reel.
Overwriting has been the constant weakness in Farhadi’s filmmaking, but here the writer-director — who should really consider passing scriptwriting duties on to someone else for a change — truly outdoes himself.
Aesthetically flawless, but too melodramatic and generic for me
Rarely has a filmmaker been so intimately tied to place as writer/director Asghar Farhadi is to his native Iran. Since his 2003 directorial debut, six of his eight films have been set there, examining such topics as divorce, crime, secrets and lies, and the themes for which he's best known; class and the importance of the past in the present. Todos lo saben [lit. trans. Everybody Knows It] is his second film set outside Iran, taking place in Spain, and although it finds him working for the first time within a relatively conventional genre template, it remains very much a Farhadi film; examining what can happen when intense pressure causes long-buried secrets to rise to the surface. However, although beautifully shot, Todos is easily the weakest film in his oeuvre, and whereas his previous work is elegant, nuanced, and perfectly formed, Todos clumsily falls back on clichéd genre tropes and heavy-handed melodramatic plotting.
Laura (Penélope Cruz) is a Spanish woman living in Buenos Aires who returns to her hometown outside Madrid with her teenage daughter Irene (Carla Campra) and young son Diego (Ivan Chavero) for her sister's wedding. She is particularly looking forward to seeing Paco (Javier Bardem), the son of the family maid, with whom she grew up and was in love for many years. Now married to local girl Bea (Bárbara Lennie), Paco co-owns a local vineyard, which he bought from Laura at a low rate. However, when Irene is kidnapped, it doesn't take long until the families are at one another's throats, with old animosities resurfacing, and distrust spreading between them. To make matters worse, Irene is ill, and without her medication, she will soon die.
As one would expect from Farhadi, Todos is aesthetically flawless, with José Luis Alcaine's photography capturing the sun-kissed Spanish countryside beautifully, with a gorgeous palette of rich browns, golds, and reds. Drawing the audience's attention to the importance of time, the film inside a cathedral clock. However, the scene also strikes a more ominous note - the bell tower features a hole through which smaller birds can come and go, but it is too small for the pigeon who also flits around the clock, trapping him inside.
A major theme is the weight of the past on the present - seen most clearly in how Laura's father, Antonio (Ramon Barea), resents Paco's purchase of Laura's land, and how Bea believes that Paco is still in love with Laura. More specifically, the film looks at secrets, examining the importance of who knows what, and the more complex issue that much of what we do in any given situation is based on what we assume other people do and do not know.
However, it's in relation to secrets where the narrative begins to fall down. The film builds tension reasonably well until about two-thirds of the way through, when it unveils the biggest secret. However, it's a revelation so telegraphed, when the scene came, I literally had to remind myself that the character involved was unaware of the information being shared. The actors play the hell out of the scene, but Farhadi is so self-serious about the profundity of the moment that it almost has a comic effect.
The film also strays into melodrama far more than in any of Farhadi's previous work, and the longer the film goes on, the more clumsy the script becomes, with the heavy-handed deterministic plotting lacking the grace and light-handedness of his previous work. The fact that Irene needs medication or will soon die is a particularly egregious example of this; a detail shoehorned into the narrative to arbitrarily create extra tension. It's a clichéd genre trope, that is, quite frankly, beneath an auteur of Farhadi's calibre. Another issue is that the central conflicts aren't as well grounded in the milieu as in his Iran-set work, where the issues explored arise directly from the immediate environment.
Farhadi is on his game aesthetically, and, once again dealing with issues of class and the destructive power of the past, so too thematically. The problem is the narrative. He piles so much on that I just stopped caring, as the plot lurched from secret to twist to secret. There's nothing wrong with grafting one's thematic preoccupations onto a genre framework, of course; filmmakers as varied as Michael Mann, David Fincher, and Christopher Nolan work within genre conventions, but are very much auteurs. However, when doing so, one must pay attention to the genre elements of one's film or they will be overwhelmed, grinding against the themes rather than organically co-existing with them. That's exactly what happens in Todos. Beautiful to look at, and thematically interesting, it's let down by a disappointing narrative.
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The studio synopsis says "EVERYBODY KNOWS (TODOS LO SABEN) follows Laura (Cruz) on her travels from Argentina to her small home town in Spain for her sister's wedding, bringing her two children along for the occasion. Amid the joyful reunion and festivities, the eldest daughter is abducted. In the tense days that follow, various family and community tensions surface and deeply hidden secrets are revealed."
Ah, if only the story was that simple but when you are dealing with 10 plus family manners, an ex-boyfriend, a kidnapping, money problems, alcoholics, estates, a winery not to forget such red herrings as a young boy wearing bright red glasses you can understand why the movie is 132 minutes long. It takes about twenty minutes to get the story going with some characters dismissed quickly and others getting more time than necessary.
To be honest I could just watch Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem alone on screen just talking but the fact that they were sweethearts when younger is referred to as a plot point and then sort of forgotten though they spend more time on screen than any other actor.
At times the movie is a telenovela, other times a mystery thriller but most times jumps all over the place that it doesn't quite make sense. With the kindness of a lady sitting nearby, reminding us of something that happened at the beginning of the movie, the explanation of the mystery sort of made sense.
"Everybody Knows" isn't a must-see movie but if you are a fan of Cruz and/or Bardem, and I am, plus like scenic movies, you might not get involved with the convoluted story but you will enjoy the movie
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"¿Pero como puedes ser tan inocente?"
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( 68/100 )
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Este proyecto cinematográfico, que no es de Hollywood pero sí es de relevancia internacional, tiene un contexto muy interesante. El director es Asghar Farhadi, nacido en Iran y responsable de levantar el nombre de su país en los festivales de cine internacional más importantes del mundo. Ya sea en Cannes o en Berlin, Farhadi ha sido premiado enormemente por la complejidad de las situaciones sociales que expone en sus proyectos. Películas como About Elly (2009), su más relevante y ganadora de un Academy Award A Separation (2011), The Past (2013) nominada a mejor película extranjera en los Golden Globes del 2014 y su también ganadora de un Oscar A Salesman (2016) lo han demostrado como un director comprometido con su cultura y su arte. Este año presentó ante Cannes su nuevo proyecto y su primero que no es de colaboración Iraní. En Cannes, su mayor éxito fue la crítica, y a partir de ahí buscó su lugar en varios festivales internacionales.
Todos Lo Saben es una tensión social disparada gracias a un acontecimiento trágico que revelará antiguas heridas, rencores e intenciones cuyas interacciones le da el valor a la película. El ejercicio social que provoca Farhadi es muy similar al que exige en sus proyectos; al estar escrita por él mismo, se nota un control total en las diversas direcciones que planea para los personajes y eso le da cierta certidumbre y garantía a su público. El problema está en el primer acto, pues será un reto para el público cargar un establecimiento de personajes que puede ser algo largo y, sin el contexto adecuado, inútil. Éste acto, de casi 40 min, resta expectativa y atención al público, pero también lo deja con ganas de un cambio drástico de situaciones, y cuando ésto pasa, en el segundo acto, hay una sensación de observar un nuevo comienzo. Esto no es realmente benéfico, pues las posturas del elenco se vuelven un poco reiterativas y aunque el objetivo del segundo acto es revelar de la forma más sutil e inteligente los discursos de cada personaje, su pasividad lo hace algo pesado de seguir. Y durante el tercer acto, en medio de la solución del misterio y la intriga añadida, el tiempo para apaciguar la tensión y generar nuevos misterios también se siente muy arrastrada.
Por otro lado, es necesario recalcar que esa pasividad permite un cuidado de la ambientación correcto. Hay un permiso que tienen los actores para crear esa ambientación y presentarla de la forma más personal, humana y dramática posible. En ese aspecto, el elenco hace un trabajo muy respetable para sostener la película, pues la tensión total la crean ellos. La responsabilidad se ladea entre Penélope Cruz y JavierBardem, sin embargo la participación de Ricardo Darín, Bárbara Lennie y Ramón Barea también brilla en sus respectivas escenas.
La fotografía también es decente, y aunque no busca aprovechar el panorama de la locación, sí cuida el espacio que los personajes ocupan en la pantalla para generar cierta poética corporal.
Es algo complejo reseñar ésta película, pues los elementos exitosos se **** con los elementos deficientes. Todos Lo Saben no tiene un mensaje específico, pero sí una trayectoria muy concreta; y por más intensa o sensible que sea una escena, hoy otra pesada y desgastante. No quiero decir que Todos Lo Saben es mediocre, pero entre errores y aciertos logra un equilibrio duro de digerir en donde su preparación es mejor que su sabor.
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[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]
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Production Company
Memento Films Production,
Morena Films,
Lucky Red,
France 3 Cinéma,
Untitled Films,
Rai Cinema,
Memento Films,
Ledafilms,
Prokino Filmverleih,
Cineart,
Cofinova 14,
Indéfilms 6,
Canal+,
France Télévisions,
Ciné+,
Movistar+
Release Date Feb 8, 2019
Duration 2 h 13 m
Rating R
Tagline Alguien secuestró a su hija. ¿Quien está detrás? [Someone kidnapped her daughter. Who did it?] (Argentine teaser poster)
Awards
Cinema Writers Circle Awards, Spain
• 8 Nominations
Goya Awards
• 8 Nominations
Feroz Awards, ES
• 6 Nominations
