𝙿𝚊𝚛𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚎𝚕 𝚃𝚊𝚕𝚎𝚜 Where the Gaze Breathes in the Silence of the Sound Studio

𝙿𝚊𝚛𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚎𝚕 𝚃𝚊𝚕𝚎𝚜

𝙳𝚒𝚛𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚋𝚢 𝙰𝚜𝚐𝚑𝚊𝚛 𝙵𝚊𝚛𝚑𝚊𝚍𝚒

𝙲𝚊𝚗𝚗𝚎𝚜 𝟸𝟶𝟸𝟼

At its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival, “Parallel Tales” received an extraordinary response from audiences who still enter movie theaters with genuine passion for discovering cinema. This time, Asghar Farhadi presents perhaps the most radical and philosophical work of his career , a film concerned not simply with storytelling, but with the very nature of cinematic perception itself; a world in which images pass through memory, absence, imagination, and interpretation before they ever become reality.

The film opens with a remarkable performance by Isabelle Huppert as a writer whose stories seem to emerge not from ordinary life, but from cinema itself. She names her characters through accidental observations of strangers in the street, windows across buildings, and fleeting figures passing by, as if the characters are born through the gaze before they are ever written on the page. She watches people, reconstructs them in her mind, and transfers them from the realm of observation onto the white page of her typewriter.

It feels as though Farhadi, this time, is thinking less about characters themselves and more about the screenplay, the gaze, and the process through which cinematic perception is formed. The world of the film is born not from streets and events, but through the telescope lens and the writer’s memory.

The choice of the telescope is deeply intelligent. Unlike binoculars, traditionally associated with surveillance, entertainment, or voyeurism, the telescope becomes an instrument of concentration, focus, and psychological distance. Its monocular nature changes the quality of vision itself. Binoculars still preserve a natural continuity between the eyes and the world, but the telescope isolates vision and transforms it into a mental, analytical, and imaginative process.

The film seems determined to turn the short physical distance between two sides of a street into an immense psychological and imaginative journey.

Gradually, Isabelle’s hidden observations of others transform her into someone who no longer experiences reality as it exists, but as it is reconstructed within her own consciousness. The typewriter, scattered notes, windows, and telescope lens all become part of the machinery through which her inner world is created. The characters she writes about feel less like real individuals and more like reflections of parents, memories, friendships, and fragments of her personal past.

As the film progresses, the writer increasingly begins to resemble the filmmaker himself — an artist who has spent years observing people from a distance, listening to their silences, writing fragments on pieces of paper, and pinning them to walls until storytelling itself emerges from those scattered observations.

The telescope here is not merely a device of observation; it becomes a metaphor for cinema itself, a lens that simultaneously records, distorts, and reconstructs reality.

It is precisely here that the film enters the territory of the Gaze. In “Parallel Tales,” looking is never neutral. Before an image is fully perceived, it already passes through memory, desire, loss, and imagination. No two characters experience the same image identically. Each person rewrites what they see inside their own mind.

For this reason, the film becomes less about seeing and more about the construction of images within human consciousness.

Farhadi also uses color not merely as aesthetic decoration, but as part of the film’s perceptual architecture. As the story moves closer to writing, imagination, and cinema itself, the image gradually becomes colder and more blue-toned — as though the characters are drifting away from tangible reality and entering the world of memory and mental reconstruction. In contrast, everyday life often returns through warmer tones, reds, and living textures , spaces where bodies, touch, and physical reality still possess weight.

One of the film’s most delicate details is the blue nail polish on the writer’s index finger as it moves across the typewriter keys — a brief yet deeply meaningful image that seems to separate writing itself from the world of reality. The blue continues the film’s cold psychological landscape, where imagination and memory slowly replace the solidity of the real world.

Even reflections of light become part of the film’s perceptual structure. One of the most beautiful moments occurs when Isabelle awakens through the reflection of light bouncing off a tin can and redirects it toward a minimalist blue geometric painting on the wall , an image that suddenly evokes the visual memory of Kieslowski’s Blue.

Yet Farhadi does not stop at visual homage. If in Kieslowski’s cinema the cold blue image merged with silence, music, and grief, here that emotional atmosphere is transferred into the sound studio itself , a place where sound is created not for realism, but for the completion of cinematic perception.

In “Parallel Tales,” the image is born in silence before it is ever heard. The telescope creates a suspended, silent world, and only afterward does the sound studio attempt to give that silent image memory, emotion, and meaning.

It is here that language enters the electricity of human gazes and love moves beyond physics and chemistry. The silent world of the telescope is reborn inside the sound studio, where music finally gives life to the image.

Farhadi is no longer simply making a film about seeing, but about the creation of cinematic experience itself , images born in silence and sound arriving later to complete their meaning.

The film’s cinematic form and editing are equally extraordinary. Unlike many of Farhadi’s earlier works, this film refuses to rush toward conflict. Instead, it observes its characters through patience, silence, and emotional distance. The cuts are soft and fluid, as though the film moves not between scenes, but between layers of consciousness and perception.

The traditional sound studio itself becomes profoundly symbolic. It is not merely a location, but the memory of Farhadi’s cinema. If theater in The Salesman functioned as a metaphor for reconstructing life, here the sound studio plays that role for cinema itself , a place where sounds are recreated, emotions are performed again, and reality is rebuilt.

It feels as though Farhadi has returned to unfinished wounds, abandoned objects, and unresolved emotions from his previous films. Throughout “Parallel Tales,” certain images and objects quietly reconnect us to earlier worlds in his cinema. It is as if the abandoned red shoes from The Salesman have returned with a new identity , now transformed into blue, absorbed into imagination and memory. Even the silent ill father from A Separation seems to remain alive within the film’s visual memory, beside the blue bathroom bathtub, continuing to exist through silence, care, and observation.

Violations of privacy, intrusions into solitude, and hidden violence still linger in the corners of Farhadi’s cinematic universe, returning again and again through recurring images and emotional structures.

Even motifs such as massive construction machinery, bulldozers, and mechanical noise return. The same machines that created artificial anxiety in The Salesman now reappear reflected in restaurant windows, echoing the inner collapse of the characters themselves.

One of the film’s greatest achievements is precisely this return to Farhadi’s own cinematic universe. Yet this return is never nostalgic or explanatory. He reconstructs the past through perception itself. The telescope does not simply bring distant spaces closer; it connects Farhadi’s films to one another. Through its lens, he appears to look back at his own cinematic memory — at characters, objects, and emotions left unfinished in earlier works.

In this process, the film also revisits one of Farhadi’s central cinematic motifs: lies.

But lies in Farhadi’s cinema are never merely tools of deception. They are often attempts to preserve relationships, control pain, or make reality emotionally bearable. In About Elly, A Separation, The Salesman, and even A Hero, truth is always unstable , endlessly rewritten through perception and narrative.

In “Parallel Tales,” violence, betrayal, and suspicion are psychological long before they become factual. What destroys relationships is not necessarily the event itself, but the image constructed around it within the human mind. Just as Emad’s anger in The Salesman gradually transformed into an obsession with humiliation and revenge, here too the gaze, the image, and storytelling slowly begin to destroy intimacy itself.

The film’s treatment of writing and artistic creation gains further meaning through the presence of Catherine Deneuve as the publisher. Her appearance is not merely a casting gesture; she becomes a bridge between Farhadi’s world and the memory of the French New Wave. Her constant demands for rewrites, deletions, and modifications evoke the long history of censorship and artistic interference imposed upon writers and filmmakers.

From here, the film slowly moves toward the cinema of François Truffaut. Paris in “Parallel Tales” is not simply a city; it becomes a space for wandering, healing, and being wounded again. The city still seems haunted by the memory of love, loneliness, and emotional failure carried by French New Wave cinema.

In The 400 Blows, the typewriter is not simply a stolen object for Antoine, but a symbol of writing, escape, and the reconstruction of identity. In “Parallel Tales,” the telescope gradually acquires a similar meaning. For Adam, the lens is not merely a tool of observation, but an entrance into the writer’s psychological universe — a world where reality and imagination constantly slide into one another.

Bicycles, rain, train stations, and wandering through Parisian streets slowly bring us back to the memory of Truffaut’s cinema. Yet Farhadi never imitates this history directly; instead, he absorbs it into his own cinematic language. It feels as though all the parallel wounds of Truffaut’s films have now appeared on different reels of film inside Farhadi’s world.

At many moments, the film also recalls the cinema of Wim Wenders , a cinema in which looking itself becomes an existential search. In Wenders’ films, characters constantly stare at cities, roads, windows, and photographs not simply to see, but to understand their own place in the world. “Parallel Tales” approaches a similar territory, where images enter human memory and loneliness before they ever become representation.

Ultimately, “Parallel Tales” is a film about the collision of parallel worlds — worlds that intersect within memory, perception, and human consciousness despite all logical boundaries.

And perhaps its greatest achievement is that it slowly becomes a metaphor for cinema itself. Because cinema, too, is nothing but the gaze , a way of seeing the world again through a lens. What we see on screen is never reality itself, but the filmmaker’s perception of reality.

For this reason, the writer within the film can also be seen as a reflection of Farhadi himself, an auteur who creates the world through observation, selection, omission, and reconstruction. He watches people, listens to voices, gathers scattered fragments of life, and transforms them into narrative — precisely what Farhadi himself has done throughout his career.

And perhaps this is exactly why “Parallel Tales” feels so personal, philosophical, and radical: because cinema here is no longer simply a tool for storytelling, but the very subject of the story itself.