Parallel Tales review – Isabelle Huppert pens furtive sexual fantasy for Vincent Cassel in Asghar Farhadi’s latest

Cannes film festival: Iranian auteur Asghar Farhadi returns to France with this intriguing middleweight meta-drama featuring a cameo from Catherine Deneuve

Asghar Farhadi is the Iranian auteur whose film-making style has always shown the high European influences of Antonioni and Haneke. He has in fact made two films in Europe: The Past in France and Everybody Knows in Spain.

Now he returns to France and the French language for this diverting, middleweight meta-drama about betrayal and about a supposed link between voyeurism and creativity: do writers spy on the characters they have brought to life?