SUMMARY

The description of the plot of Asghar Farhadi's About Elly might give the impression that Farhadi is gunning for the position of ‘the Iranian Antonioni’. At a closer view, it turns out not to really be the case. Despite lifting its storyline straight from the art cinema classic L'Avventura by Antonioni, unlike the Italian film director, Farhadi uses the situation of a missing woman to make sharp observations about his society, particularly the position of women and marital relationships. The aim of this paper is to use the notion of intertextuality to examine the relations between these two films. Analysing About Elly along the vertical axis, which connects the text/film to other texts/films I would like to compare the similarities and differences in the narrative structure and in the comment on the social world.

About Elly (Darbāre-ye Elly, 2009) is the fourth film directed by Asghar Farhadi. 1 He started his career by making short 8mm and 16mm films in the Isfahan branch of the Iranian Young Cinema Society before moving on to writing plays and screenplays for the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB).2 He also directed such TV series as A Tale of a City and co-wrote some screenplays. Dancing in the Dust (Raqs dar ghobār, 2003) was his feature film debut, which was followed by A Beautiful City (Shahr-e zibā, 2004) and Fireworks Wednesday (Chahārshanbe-suri, 2006).

As it was in his previous movie, the topic of About Elly is the relationship among some middle class families in contemporary Iran. A group of friends from Tehran go on a three-day vacation near the Caspian Sea. They are former classmates from the Faculty of Law at the university. The three couples include Sepide (Golshifte Farahani) and her husband Amir who have a little daughter. Shohre and her husband Peyman have two children including their little son Arash. Nazi and her husband Manuchehr are the third family. The trip is planned by Sepide, who brings along her daughter's kindergarten teacher Elly (Tarane Alidusti). Sepide's hidden agenda in bringing Elly on this trip is to set her up with Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini), a divorcee who has come back from Germany and is looking for a new wife.