PARALLEL STORIES
- Serge Leterrier
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
PARALLEL STORIES
A film by Asghar Farhadi
Understanding without reducing
Presented in the Official Selection of the 79th Cannes Film Festival
Serge Leterrier — For Diamont Média
In Parallel Stories, Asghar Farhadi offers a space for perception rather than a narrative to resolve. Trajectories intersect, perspectives shift, and each point of view illuminates a fragment of reality. The film invites us to embrace human complexity with sincerity and clarity.
“To look is already to accept the displacement of certainty.” — Serge Leterrier
Parallel Stories brings together Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, Vincent Cassel, Pierre Niney, Adam Bessa and Catherine Deneuve. A rare ensemble, where each presence already carries its own history, its own weight, its own way of inhabiting space. Farhadi did not assemble a cast. He gathered gazes.
Some films move through plot. Parallel Stories reshapes the way we look. From its opening moments, a subtle sensation emerges, almost imperceptible, as if the film seeks less to explain than to let something circulate between individuals—a word, a doubt, a perception passing from one gaze to another.
Asghar Farhadi constructs a space where each trajectory holds its own coherence. Characters move forward with their certainties, their memories, their wounds, forming a living, shifting substance that resists any simplified reading. The film does not organize reality. It reveals it in its density, in its complexity, in the way it transforms as soon as multiple perspectives intersect.
Very quickly, a sensation takes hold. Every situation contains several versions. Every word opens another path. Every silence suggests an added depth. The narrative unfolds like an unstable surface, where certainties shift, positions evolve, and listening becomes essential.
We enter the film with reference points. We leave with questions. And within that space, something changes. Our gaze adjusts. Our attention sharpens. A form of awareness emerges, almost instinctive, toward the way we perceive others.
Farhadi does not stage conflict in a frontal way. He explores displacement. Subtle shifts. Moments where intention meets interpretation. Where a sincere gesture takes on a different meaning. Where a word, clear to the one who speaks it, transforms in the mind of the one who receives it.
It is no coincidence that this film finds its source in Krzysztof Kieślowski's Décalogue 6 — that meditation on the gaze, on the desire to see and to be seen, on the fragile boundary between observing and understanding. Farhadi inherits from that tradition without reproducing it. He moves through it in his own way, adding his own cartography of human misreadings.
Within this space, each character acts with a sense of truth rooted in their own understanding of the world. And that sense of truth, rather than easing tension, generates a particular form of unease. A tension grounded not in opposition, but in the coexistence of multiple truths.
Parallel Stories advances with remarkable precision in its observation of human behavior. A diverted gaze, a hesitation, a withheld word. Every detail contributes to a construction where nothing feels forced, where everything rests on balance.
We begin to feel a disturbing proximity to these situations. Because these shifts belong to everyday life. Because each of us carries the capacity to understand and misinterpret at the same time. Because human connection rests on this fragile equilibrium.
Farhadi’s cinema follows this movement with restraint. The direction serves the interactions. It allows exchanges to breathe. It gives time a central function. Each scene becomes a space where something shifts, often in ways that remain almost invisible.
This approach creates a singular immersion. We no longer seek to know. We seek to understand. And this shift transforms our position as spectators. We become active witnesses, involved in the circulation of perceptions.
As the narrative unfolds, a sense of responsibility emerges. A responsibility of the gaze. An attention to how we listen, how we interpret, how we form judgments. The film acts as a mirror, revealing the complexity of human relationships without simplifying them.
In an era marked by immediate positions and rapid conclusions, Parallel Stories proposes a different rhythm. A slower tempo. An openness. An invitation to hold multiple perspectives without the need to rank them.
This approach gives the film a deeply human resonance. It is no longer about determining who is right. It is about recognizing what each person carries, what each person endures, what each person perceives through their own history.
Farhadi creates a form of inner tension, quiet yet persistent, that accompanies the viewer beyond the screening itself. A tension tied to our relationship with reality, to the way we construct meaning from partial elements.
The film leaves a lasting imprint. It does not seek closure. It opens. It invites us to continue this reflection within our own way of seeing the world and others.
Through Parallel Stories, cinema reconnects with an essential function. It becomes a space of circulation. A place where perceptions meet, confront each other, and expand. A place where human complexity finds a truthful form of expression.
We leave with a clear sensation. Understanding does not lie in deciding. Understanding calls for listening, for looking, for accepting that multiple truths can coexist within the same space.
And within that coexistence, something happens.Something that connects us.
“A single truth reassures. A shared truth transforms.” — Serge Leterrier
In theaters May 14, 2026 | 2h 19min | Drama
