Everybody Knows, Cannes opening film, review: Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz give fine performances but are let down by an improbable story

Iranian director Asghar Farhadi directs this Spanish kidnap drama about a town full of secrets

Asghar Farhadi, 130 mins, starring: Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem

The 71st Cannes Festival began last night with the world premiere of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s Everybdoy Knows, starring Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz. But after a glittering opening ceremony in which festival jury President Cate Blanchett and revered director Martin Scorsese declared the official start of the event, the film itself turned out to be anti-climactic.

Everybody Knows is the story of a kidnapping. It’s a very delicately observed affair but also an extremely melodramatic one, with a plot which could have been borrowed from an afternoon soap opera.

Laura (Penelope Cruz) is a married woman returning from Argentina to her home town in Spain with her children, including her headstrong teenage daughter, Irene (Carla Campra), for a wedding. The joyful, uneventful overture to the film belies what is about to happen. Laura is delighted to be back. Then, on the wedding night itself, Irene vanishes.

It quickly emerges that she has been kidnapped, clearly by someone local. The ransom price is 300,000 Euros.

The kidnapping opens up fault lines everywhere. In this sleepy, seemingly contented town, grievances have been festering for years. Tensions run across class, family and generational lines. Neighbours friendly in public turn out to detest one another.

The biggest secret, and the most open one, is that Laura still has strong feelings for her childhood sweetheart, local wine farmer Paco (Javier Bardem). “Everybody knows that they were in love,” we are told early on.

In the chaos after the kidnapping, people begin to behave very badly. We learn more about the circumstances in which Laura’s family lost their land and in which Paco, a servant’s son, was able to climb up the social ladder. Laura’s husband, the ultra-religious reformed alcoholic Alejandro (Ricardo Darin), absent from the wedding for reasons that aren’t initially explained, flies over from Argentina. The family is terrified to go to the police because of a similar kidnapping years before in which the victim was murdered.

Every cupboard that director Farhadi rattles around in turns out to have a skeleton in it. Whether it’s the belligerent, bad tempered grandfather who is always ready to throw away his crutches to have a fight in the bar or the enigmatic young woman who makes mystery visits to the doctor and always comes home with muddy boots, all the characters here are harbouring guilty secrets.

Characters have gambled away their land and inheritance or had secret affairs. Children have been born out of wedlock. “Not talking about things isn’t the same as resolving them,” one woman observes of how, following the kidnapping, so many old feuds are re-ignited.

In its most powerful moments, Everybody Knows is full of acute and often very pessimistic observations about human behaviour. At the root of all the tension here is money. The town is depressed. Unemployment is high (one reason why the immigrants hired by Paco to pick his grapes are so resented). Those who’ve managed to leave and seemingly make a success of their lives are deeply resented.

Real life husband and wife team Bardem and Cruz both give fine performances but are let down by a storyline which throws in one improbable twist after another. Paco and Laura are still clearly in love but neither one will admit it. Bardem shows us both Paco’s ambition as a self-made man and his insecurity. He is the servant’s son and some in the town will never let him forget it. The wine grower always gives the impression that he is hiding something. His true feelings toward Laura are apparent to everyone but himself.

Cruz’s Laura starts the film in effervescent fashion but once separated from her daughter, she too reveals her grief and anger. The most thankless role is that of Ricardo Darin as Laura’s husband, the man caught between the lovers. Certain details which Farhadi reveals about his past make little sense and it is baffling why Laura married him in the first place.

Everybody Knows is gripping enough as a family thriller to keep our attention. Some of its scenes, notably the wedding itself and the various fraught family reunions which follow it, are beautifully handled.

The film, though, is let down by its creaky and increasingly improbable plotting. Farhadi may have won Oscars for A Separation and The Salesman but he is highly unlikely to repeat the feat with this, his first Spanish-language drama.