‘Parallel Tales’ Review: Isabelle Huppert Is a French Novelist Spying on the Apartment Across the Street in Asghar Farhadi’s Weirdly Muddled Voyeuristic Head Game

Sylvie (Isabelle Huppert), the pivotal figure in Asghar Farhadi’s “Parallel Tales,” is a French novelist whose better days are behind her. She lives in a stately old Paris apartment that’s starting to fray at the seams, and her whole vibe is that of an analog crank. When she goes into writing mode, she lights up a cigarette, puts on her stodgy spectacles and sits down at her ancient Olivetti electric typewriter, which is clearly the same machine she’s been using for decades.

As she starts the writing process, she pecks at the typewriter a few letters at a time. It’s doubtful, however, that a veteran writer would sound like that — instead, the keys would be flying. It’s a minor but telling detail, since Farhadi is generally a stickler for authenticity. But in “Parallel Tales,” Isabelle Huppert, putting on overdone grouchy airs, seems to be playing less a real-world novelist than a stylized cornball-movie version of a Venerable French Author. The character seems not so much drawn from experience as plucked from a vat of pulp cliché. And that’s mostly true of the rest of the movie as well.

“Parallel Tales” is a very different sort of Farhadi film. It’s not the first project the fabled Iranian director has shot in France — that would be “The Past” (2013), which he made on the heels of his international breakthrough with “A Separation.” But though he had already begun the painful process of parting ways with Iran (in 2024, Farhadi vowed not to shoot another movie there until the ban against depicting women without headscarves was lifted), “The Past” was every inch a Farhadi film. It had his domestic psychodramatic intensity, and his flowing ingenuity.

The new movie, by contrast, is an inflated meditation on fiction and reality. It’s all about people spying on each other, which can be a good jumping-off point for a movie. And no one is saying that Farhadi has to stick to his familiar and often starkly artful mode of neorealist drama. But “Parallel Tales,” it’s my grim duty to report, is a meandering and rather amorphous mess. It’s a far-out parable of voyeurism and imagination, loosely based on the sixth episode of Krzysztof Kieślowki’s “Dekalog,” which was about a young man spying on a woman across the street and falling in love with her. But “Dekalog: Six” had suspense; “Parallel Tales” has longueurs.

As Sylvie starts peering through her small telescope at the fifth-floor apartment directly across from her, what takes place behind those windows is not what we expect. The place is a sound-effects recording studio, with three sound designers creating and dubbing aural effects — footsteps on a sandy beach, flapping bird wings — onto pieces of film footage. But the three are also involved in a love triangle: the curly-brown-haired Anna (Virginie Efira), who is romantic partners with the older head of production (Vincent Cassel), is seeing her younger co-worker (Pierre Niney) on the sly. We watch this and think: Okay, so what? But it turns out that the triangle we’re observing is already Sylvie’s fictionalized version of what she saw through the telescope.

Since Sylvie hasn’t exactly been taking good care of herself, her niece, Céline (India Hair), who owns half the apartment, sets her up with a young drifter, Adam (Adam Bess), who rescued Céline from a subway pickpocket. The doleful, scruffy Adam cleans the apartment (though he also shepherds a family of mice), and he then takes Sylvie’s abandoned manuscript — the fictional scenario we’ve been watching — and palms it off as his own. He gives it to a woman named Nita (also played by Virginie Efira, now blonde), who he meets at a coffeeshop. He wants her to read the manuscript, even as the film now segues into showing us the real version of what’s been going on in that apartment. (It’s less racy, though it still involves a lurch toward adultery.) Are we having brain spasms yet?

The most baffling dimension of “Parallel Tales” is how little life there is to the characters outside of these fiction-vs.-reality gambits. It’s not that the actors are bad. Vincent Cassel invests Pierre with a no-longer-young sense of regret, and Virginie Efira, in her double role, makes you feel the sharpness of Nita’s pain in contrast to Anna’s more libertine ‘tude. Yet none of this comes to much. When Nita rebuffs the advances of the lightweight cad Christophe (who’s Pierre’s brother), that’s the one focused emotion in the movie — a woman rejecting workplace harassment. No problem there, but it feels like a different film. 

In an abstract way, Farhadi is looking back to films like “Rear Window” and “Blow-Up” and “The Conversation,” as well as De Palma’s “Blow Out” and “Body Double.” But those movies, in different ways, were about trickery and deceit, about drawing the audience into a head game of perception. (“Blow-Up,” 60 years ago, was one of the movies that made art cinema fun, while “Body Double,” preposterous as it is, is vintage guilty-pleasure De Palma.) In “Parallel Tales,” Farhadi doesn’t play the audience so much as stymie it with the obliqueness of his storytelling. The movie manages to be rigorously muddled despite not being all that complicated. Maybe that’s because the tales it tells are parallel, all right. It feels like they’re competing to underwhelm you.