Pointless and boring. Expected more from the director of "Separatiion". "Past" wasn't bad also, but these "Salesman" and "About Elli" far from good movie maker.

First, the acting in this movie was stellar. The direction was as well. The problem? There was no story. I see the reviews, even by "experts," and it is almost laughable. Are we that determined to praise a nation known for anything but its arts because of that? Watch, wait for "the moment," and when it ends, I challenge you not to say, "Ho hum, I already knew that."

Please feel free to skip reading the text that follows this paragraph even though there are no spoilers... This film is best enjoyed immersing yourself in the film and not knowing anything much apart from the title and the director behind it. The audience gets treated to a fine ensemble of brilliant performers that the 21st-century Iranian cinema has to offer. Farahani, Alidoosti, Zare'i, Azadivar, Hosseini, Haghighi, Maadi, Mehranfar, who all gave top-notch performances in what is very much a character study where the audience is presented the complications that arise when someone introduces a stranger to a close-knit peer group and that someone also hides some info about that person that could get them in trouble, and trouble got to them indeed.They all traveled together as a group for a vacation but there is a misunderstanding regarding the accommodations they have booked, the caretakers thinking they were only staying for one day instead of three, and the owner of the lodging set to use it the day after. They then instead had no choice but to take a dilapidated seaside lodging that they have to clean up themselves. Farhadi inserts in this film his commentary regarding the Iranian society's norms that has been unanimously deemed oppressive to women around the world nowadays, regarding traveling restrictions imposed against unmarried couples and the engaged woman seemingly ALMOST a property of her fiance and have to ask permission for everything she does. The audience sees how the characters react once they realised they have trangressed those rules, the gravity attached to such a situation. And these same characters will also display the same regard and urgency to the things people with Western sensibilities believe in. This is why I believe Farhadi belongs to the group of magnificent cinematic greats these days, juxtaposing these cultural elements to evoke empathy from the non-Iranians. Some of the performers in this movie also figured out in Farhadi's other films: Hosseini and Alidoosti in The Salesman, Maadi, Hosseini and Zare'i in A Separation, and I have yet to see Alidoosti in Fireworks Wednesday and The Beautiful City.One heck of a rollercoaster of emotions, this one. I'm a sucker for these kinds of films. Wish Farhadi continues to make more of these kinds of films.This film is, in every way, an antipodic equivalent to Antonioni's L'Avventura.

"Elly" seems like a rough sketch for "A Separation" (2011), one of the best films of this century IMHO. In both cases, Farhadi's focused on social lies and deceptions and the ways they come back to bite us—as well as on the contrasts and contradictions between the lives and aspirations of contemporary Iranians and the restrictive social norms of Islam—but "Elly"'s not as tightly plotted or as involving. In many ways it's like typical film-festival fare from a non-Western country—it's a little hard to keep track of the characters at first, and it's not always clear why they're behaving the way they do… The setup's intriguing: old college friends from Tehran—three married couples and their kids and a recent divorcé—and a slightly mysterious plus one, Elly, share a clapped-out weekend cottage on the Caspian Sea. At first everyone's acting goofy, singing and busting little Zorbalike dance moves. Then something happens—two things really—and everything changes. The sky darkens, the sea gets rough, and husbands and wives are (almost literally in one case) at each other's throats. Suddenly these 21st-century sophisticates are chattering about evil portents and lost honor and fear of shaming; several layers of deception have to be unwrapped before the film's ambiguous ending. Expert cast (including the husband from "A Separation" and Nefertari from "Exodus: Gods and Kings"!); the performances seem a little over the top at times, but that may just be a cultural thing; great cinematography. Certainly worth watching, prob'ly more so if you've already seen "A Separation."