In the recent Academy Awards it was hard not to notice that the best films – or at least the most grown-up and unpredictable ones – seemed to appear in the Best Foreign Film section.
Europe, Asia and Latin America have an old-fashioned belief that not only teenagers are watching films. And Spain’s Everybody Knows is a good example.
Photo: Screenshot/Focus Features
It isn’t even a big award-winner – it’s just how high the bar is set for a halfway decent film in Europe these days. It’s only away from European film festivals that a film like this seems out of the ordinary.
The stars of Everybody Knows are three of the best in the Hispanic world – from Spain, stellar couple Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, and from Argentina, the great Ricardo Darin.
Interestingly in Everybody Knows, Cruz and Darin are the married couple – Laura and Alejandro – while Bardem is a long-gone ex.
The story opens as Laura returns to Madrid from her new home in Buenos Aires for a family wedding.
Laura has brought her two children – a 6-year-old boy and teenager Irene.
They’re welcomed home in a wave of “olas”, culminating in an affectionate greeting from old boyfriend Paco - Bardem.
But lest we think we know where this is going, it’s established that both the former lovers are now happily married to other people.
In fact the major stress in the family comes from Laura’s disreputable father who seems to have antagonized the entire neighbourhood for years.
But the family cracks are papered over sufficiently for a successful wedding and a happy party afterwards. The one incident is Laura’s daughter Irene goes to bed complaining of a headache.
Shortly afterwards there’s a power cut, and the lights all go out.
Laura is concerned, she goes upstairs to check on her daughter and finds the bedroom door has been locked.
When they break the door open, Irene has gone, and all the evidence is that she’s been kidnapped.
Part of the “Everybody Knows” of the title is the fact that Laura’s husband Alejandro is famously a very wealthy Argentinian businessman.
It’s his money the kidnappers seem to be targeting. Laura panics and urges her husband to join her from Buenos Aires.
But is all what it seems? It’s clear that someone knows more than they’re saying, and all the indications are that someone in the family may have been involved in the kidnapping. That’s if in fact it was a kidnapping…
There are suspicions raised among the wedding guests. Has Irene actually been kidnapped, or is it a ploy of hers to get away from her family? Paco asks Laura whether she altogether trusts her husband, who’s suddenly having problems raising the ransom.
As the secrets and lies mount up, we’re reminded of writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s previous films.
The Iranian Farhadi has certainly been here before in both his multi-award winning film A Separation and in the more recent The Salesman. His MO is taking an apparently simple situation, then adding twist after twist.
What starts as a simple Agatha Christie whodunit shifts from potential culprits to whether a crime has been committed at all – and if it has, by whom and on whom?
In these complex family disputes, resentment goes hand in hand with favours and no good deed goes completely unpunished.
By the end, many characters will be wiser, but not necessarily better off.
Like all decent thrillers Everybody Knows flatters the audience – it’s always nice to be treated as intelligent for a change. And the performances – particularly by Cruz – are well worth the price of admission.
