Asghar Farhadi’s dark drama stars Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, who have rarely gone to these emotional extremes in their work together
Asghar Farhadi’s “Everybody Knows,” which launched the 2018 Cannes in May, transplants many of the Iranian director’s usual concerns to a small village in Spain. The advance word called it a psychological thriller, and it does contain some thriller elements such as a crime and a race against time to save a young girl who’s gone missing.
But this is not Farhadi doing a genre exercise; as is most of his work, “Everybody Knows” is a quietly gripping examination of societal divisions, of class, of secrets that bind us together and pull us apart. And it’s about what happens when secrets aren’t really secrets, when “everybody knows” — or suspects, or at least gossips.
Many of those secrets swirl around Laura and Paco, played by Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem. She’s a woman from the village who has been living with her husband and children in Argentina for years, but who returns to Spain for her sister’s wedding.
Also Read: Penélope Cruz Says She Spent Months in ‘Terrifying Pain’ for Cannes Opener ‘Everybody Knows’
Cruz’s Laura is both a beloved member of this community and somehow apart from it; her resentments toward the people she left behind, and theirs toward her, aren’t always obvious, but they’re present.
Paco, on the other hand, appears to be a local farmhand working the vineyard when we first see him in sweat-drenched flannel. He looks completely comfortable as a laborer — but it turns out that this is his vineyard and his estate, and when his wife beckons him into the house to take a shower and change, it’s clear that he’s not quite as comfortable as he was out on a tractor.
