Oscar Wilde

 
Asghar Farhadi constructs a narrative device in which observation, imagination and reality gradually become entangled. Sylvie looks through a telescope, gathers fragments of other people's lives and transforms them into a story. She does not need to know the people she observes: imagining them is enough. Her novel emerges precisely from this distance between what she sees and what she assumes she sees, between an isolated gesture and the meaning she chooses to assign to it.
 
One might wonder to what extent imagination can remain separate from reality and, above all, when a hypothesis becomes a suspicion, how much it can influence the behaviour of someone who begins to believe in it.
 
This is the terrain on which Farhadi constructs his game of mirrors. Fiction does not merely reproduce life: it can anticipate it, suggest a direction for it, even create the conditions for something to happen that initially existed only in someone's mind. Suspicion, in particular, becomes a generative mechanism: it requires no proof to provoke concrete reactions. All it takes is for someone to consider it possible for relationships to begin changing, until what was not real in the first place becomes reality.
 
Writing thus assumes a function that is anything but ornamental. It is the space in which reality is constructed, manipulated, distorted and returned to its own protagonists in the form of a possible truth. It is no coincidence that when Sylvie tries to explain to someone incapable of understanding the boundary between invention and reality how a duck can be made to fit inside a bottle, the answer is simple: through imagination. The animal exists, the bottle exists, but their simultaneous presence within that space belongs to fiction. It is an elementary distinction that the male character fails to grasp and that, instead, becomes the key to understanding the entire film.
 
Yet it is above all as the story unfolds towards its conclusion that it acquires a more interesting and less predictable dimension. What initially appears to be a film about fantasies and the possibility that writing can shape reality gradually reveals itself as a reflection on the way men approach their relationship with women.
 
The relationship between observation, imagination and the appropriation of other people's lives finds an interesting parallel in Noémie Merlant's The Balconettes. Here, too, voyeurism becomes a narrative device, but the perspective is radically reversed: women are no longer merely objects of the gaze, but subjects who observe, desire, interpret and act. While in Farhadi's film writing risks transforming other people's lives into an imaginary construct capable of influencing reality, Merlant restores to the female gaze a function of emancipation and reclaiming one's own experience. Two films that explore the power of looking, but above all the question of who has the right to assign meaning to other people's lives.

The woman, despite being at the centre around which fantasies and suspicions revolve, ultimately disappears as a subject. She is no longer a person with her own experience, will and interpretation of events, but something around which men negotiate their respective power relations. Her body becomes the territory on which jealousy, possession and rivalry are played out. The issue is not so much what she desires or what she has suffered, but what her existence means to the men who compete over her, suspect her or feel challenged by her.

This perspective significantly shifts the meaning of the film. Betrayal, whether real or imagined, seems to matter far more to the men than violence itself. Being deceived, being ridiculed, losing a position of control become more pressing concerns than the woman's dignity and safety. Even when the female experience is directly involved, the story continues to be told through the consequences it produces for men.

Farhadi thus seems to suggest that the problem lies not merely in jealousy, but in a possessive conception of relationships: a woman is not fully recognised as an autonomous individual, but as a presence that defines a man's worth, identity and even masculinity in relation to other men.

In this sense, the parallel lives in the title are not merely those separating real life from its literary representation. They are also the lives of men and women who inhabit the same story without truly participating in it on equal terms: while men confront one another, women are often excluded even from the possibility of being heard.
 
The metaphor of the protagonists' work, which involves artificially creating noises and sounds to make cinematic images believable, completes the argument: even what we perceive as authentic can be constructed, added or manipulated. And perhaps this is not so different from what happens in relationships, where a suspicion can become a conviction, and a conviction can produce irreversible consequences.
 
The most interesting reversal concerns precisely the distribution of threats. The young man who follows Nita, watches her and seems to embody the most unsettling figure in the story ultimately proves to be the least dangerous: he does not seek to possess her or exert control over her life, but rather to find in her an inspiration for his own writing, as he will later do with another woman. By contrast, the men who should appear more reassuring, beginning with Nita's partner and his brother, reveal a far more possessive conception of women. The former, seemingly concerned about the young man's attentions towards her, ends up fuelling suspicions about a possible relationship between the woman and his brother; the latter, who had not initially even considered such a possibility, seems to come to regard the suspicion itself as a kind of authorisation to claim an opportunity. A paradox thus emerges: the man who appears most intrusive is interested in a woman as a possible source of inspiration, while the man closest to her seems incapable of recognising her outside the logic of possession. It is not necessarily the stranger's gaze that proves most dangerous, then, but that of the man who presumes to know a woman and, precisely for that reason, believes he can decide what place she should occupy in his life.
 
There is a scene that makes this dynamic particularly evident. Through the telescope, Nita watches what is happening in the building opposite and sees the two brothers continuing to share their workplace and their usual routines, despite what she has told them and what has happened. Apparently, nothing seems to have compromised their relationship or altered its balance. The introduction of a new element nevertheless hints at the possibility that something might still happen between them. But this is precisely where the scene's most interesting meaning emerges: even the prospect of revenge becomes a matter between men. The woman remains outside the confrontation, once again excluded from the dispute and from any recognition of her experience. What determines the weight of events is not what she has suffered, but what the episode represents in terms of power relations, pride and male rivalry. Her story thus becomes the pretext for a duel in which she is not a subject to be heard or protected, but the element around which two men measure their power against one another. Perhaps this is the film's most bitter observation: even when everything seems to revolve around a woman, what happens remains a man's affair.
 
Farhadi makes a film that questions the boundary between invention and reality, but finds its most incisive insight when it reveals what lies behind suspicion: not necessarily the fear of losing a woman, but the fear of losing control over her, while leaving everything else unchanged.
 

John Berger, Ways of Seeing