The theme of broken family runs deep through Asghar Farhadi’s movies, and Everybody Knows, his latest, carries on this motif in a grand, if not always plausible, way. This is a movie that begins with much happiness and celebration and ends in speculation and disbelief. That could make for a delicious little thriller, but somewhere along the way, as the movie develops contrivances to drive wedges between family members, it loses interest like a deflating balloon.
As it opens, Laura (Penélope Cruz) and her two kids, Irene (Carla Campra) and Diego (Iván Chavero), arrive from Argentina at a picturesque Spanish village for her younger sister’s wedding. There, in a manner not unlike a Robert Altman film or the early wedding scenes in The Godfather (1972), we are introduced to her sprawling family and a number of important peripheral players in a series of scenes that are expertly choreographed.
We meet Laura’s older sister (Elvira Mínguez), who runs the local store with her husband Fernando (Eduard Fernández). Their daughter Rocío (Sara Sálamo) is somewhat estranged. The grumpy family patriarch, Antonio (Rámon Barea), lives to pick fights with the good townspeople. Paco (Javier Bardem), an old friend of the family’s, oversees the local vineyard with his wife Bea (Bárbara Lennie). Then there is Paco’s nephew Felipe (Sergio Castellanos), who has a kind of playground romance with Irene and schemes to run away with her. There are lots of little stories going on, but on the night of the wedding, Irene is mysteriously abducted from her bedroom, and suddenly all the threads are woven together.
Naturally, the rest of the movie deals with the family’s attempts to bring Irene back. The usual abduction tropes apply here: members of the family receive anonymous text messages demanding ransoms and threatening to hurt the poor girl should the cops be notified; the family consults a retired police officer for advice; they scramble to try and consolidate the ransom money; and so on and so forth. The hysteria and panic that sweeps the sleepy village isn’t helped by the fact that another girl was abducted under similar circumstances sometime earlier. Could the same perpetrators be at work again?
Everybody Knows uses Irene’s abduction not as a device to generate suspense but as a catalyst to uncover buried secrets about Laura, her family, and most importantly, Paco. Old wounds are re-opened, past traumas relived. People start turning on each other as suspicions rise. I can’t give too much away since the movie holds off revealing the identity (or identities) of the abductor (or abductors) until about the end of the second act. I can’t even reveal the big secret that “everybody knows,” as it more or less stitches the entire plot together. But I suspect, if you’ve seen domestic thrillers like this one, and you know that Paco is played by Javier Bardem for a reason, you’d be able to gradually build your own case.
Predictable or not, Everybody Knows showcases the collective might of its cast. Cruz and Bardem, married in real life, play here two childhood friends who fell in love and then outgrew it. Cruz spends about 80 percent of the film sobbing her precious eyes out—but watch her in scenes of strength. She is quick to present herself as a woman who refuses to be pushed around. She is sly, fragile, protective, formidable, and a bit nasty when she has to be. Bardem responds appropriately to suit Paco’s emotional state at various points throughout the film.
The film is set in the lovely Spanish countryside, in the kind of town where everyone more or less grows up as one family. There’s a lot to relish, particularly the way Farhadi’s screenplay subdues any urges to turn itself into a mindless thriller, but Everybody Knows is a very modest attempt. It is straight-laced melodrama, amped up by its gorgeous scenery and impressive acting. I bought into the characters and their relationships with each other, I sympathized when tragedy fell, but to be honest, when I thought hard about the necessity of the plot, I still wasn’t quite sure why Irene was abducted in the first place.
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