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Reviews
Darbareye Elly (2009)
No Happy End of an attempted matchmaking
I liked the movie, although it was no easy entertainment. It had no Happy End, but a Tragic End. The story starts very relaxed, showing three young families (including Ahmad, brother of one of the women, who just came from Germany where he divorced) spending a weekend at a seaside cottage at the Caspian sea. The three families have the silly idea to bring together the lonely Ahmed with the baby-sitter Elly, although they know that she is engaged with another man in Teheran. Whereas all the three couples and Ahmed start to make stupid jokes about this plan, laugh about Elly when she is not around and all appear very superficial to me, Elly herself is much more closed. She is a girl with some mysteries, she keeps secrets and does not like the continuous jokes about the attempted matchmaking a lot. She tries to do the job that she was officially hired for: looking after the little kids of the three families. She frequently calls her mom, who is ill, and after one day she decides that it is better to return to Teheran. The three couples don"t want to let her go, they hide her luggage and her mobile phone. She says that she has to leave and would even walk home. The three couples and Ahmad ignore her and start to play Volleyball and go shopping. Elly helps the kids to fly a kite, but suddenly one of the little boys falls into the water and almost dies. The three man interrupt their game, suddenly get panic and jump into the sea, so finally the boy is rescued. But after some minutes they realize that Elly is missing. And suddenly, the relaxed relationship between the three couples and Ahmed turn into aggression and hate. Everybody accuses the others of being responsible for the disaster.
After one day, indeed Ellys dead body is found in the sea: She obviously died while trying to rescue the little boy. The three couples now have to inform some relatives of Elly about the accident, and they can only find Alireza, the man to whom Elly was engaged since three years. They find out his telephone number and ask him to come, claiming that Elly is just ill. When he arrives at the site, finding out that she in fact died, he breaks down. The three couples don"t want to admit that Elly was only invited to this weekend trip to match her to the divorced Ahmad. They try to make Alireza believe that Elly was hired exclusively as a baby-sitter. So they want to get around the conflict by adding more and more lies on top of each other. You can feel how their only concern is to get away with their responsibility.
I think Asghar Farhadi, the movie director, tried to show that this practice of organizing relationships for somebody is bad. It is based on an arrogant belief that relatives know what is good for their son or brother or daughter, and they can easily find a suitable partner. It is obvious that Elly hates this, since she is not sure about her 3 year long engagement with Alireza. But the three stupid couples and Ahmad think, that they have the right to interfere with her emotions. They make impolite jokes about Elly, they lie, and they don't respect her privacy. They are to superficial to see, that Elly is full of doubts about her future, and that she does not want to be pushed into a new relationship. She has thoughts that are not for the public, emotions that she does not want to show around. At the end, this stupid idea of pushing two person together leaves behind two victims: a physical one (Elly, who dies) and a mental one (Alireza, who breaks down emotionally). The bad think is that the three couples continue to lie to Alireza although they see how much he suffers from Ellies death: They tell him that Elly knew from the beginning that the weekend-trip with the three families was intended to bring her together with Ahmad. By insisting on this lie, the three couples so cruel leave the mourning Alireza believe, that his girl-friend Elly was searching for an easy adventure with another man. But Elly, in fact, never agreed with this, she said she only joins the company to look after the kids.
Bridge of Dragons (1999)
Nice Locations, awful movie
The only thing I liked on this movie was the location. It was shot in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. Main scenes took place in the National Theater "Ivan Vasov", but also in some of the Bulgarien Mountains. The story, however, was disgusting. The uniforms of the soldier were obviously purchased on one of the flee-markets in Sofia, where all sorts of old and not so old military "Haute-Coulture" is sold (lot of Nazi-junk and all kinds of Warshaw-Pact stuff). It was obvious that the only thing that was brought from Hollywood to the location were the four or six main-actors. Everything else, starting from the candles over the guns, the cars and ending with jewelery of the princess came from Bulgarien stocks. It's amazing that for a movie that claims to play in the post-nuclear US not the slightest effort is made to camouflage the original location of the plot.