Sylvie (Isabelle Huppert), the pivotal figure in Asghar Farhadi’s “Parallel Tales,” is a French novelist whose better days are behind her. She lives in a stately old Paris apartment that’s starting to fray at the seams, and her whole vibe is that of an analog crank. When she goes into writing mode, she lights up a cigarette, puts on her stodgy spectacles and sits down at her ancient Olivetti electric typewriter, which is clearly the same machine she’s been using for decades.

As she starts the writing process, she pecks at the typewriter a few letters at a time. It’s doubtful, however, that a veteran writer would sound like that — instead, the keys would be flying. It’s a minor but telling detail, since Farhadi is generally a stickler for authenticity. But in “Parallel Tales,” Isabelle Huppert, putting on overdone grouchy airs, seems to be playing less a real-world novelist than a stylized cornball-movie version of a Venerable French Author. The character seems not so much drawn from experience as plucked from a vat of pulp cliché. And that’s mostly true of the rest of the movie as well.

“Parallel Tales” is a very different sort of Farhadi film. It’s not the first project the fabled Iranian director has shot in France — that would be “The Past” (2013), which he made on the heels of his international breakthrough with “A Separation.” But though he had already begun the painful process of parting ways with Iran (in 2024, Farhadi vowed not to shoot another movie there until the ban against depicting women without headscarves was lifted), “The Past” was every inch a Farhadi film. It had his domestic psychodramatic intensity, and his flowing ingenuity.

The new movie, by contrast, is an inflated meditation on fiction and reality. It’s all about people spying on each other, which can be a good jumping-off point for a movie. And no one is saying that Farhadi has to stick to his familiar and often starkly artful mode of neorealist drama. But “Parallel Tales,” it’s my grim duty to report, is a meandering and rather amorphous mess. It’s a far-out parable of voyeurism and imagination, loosely based on the sixth episode of Krzysztof Kieślowki’s “Dekalog,” which was about a young man spying on a woman across the street and falling in love with her. But “Dekalog: Six” had suspense; “Parallel Tales” has longueurs.

As Sylvie starts peering through her small telescope at the fifth-floor apartment directly across from her, what takes place behind those windows is not what we expect. The place is a sound-effects recording studio, with three sound designers creating and dubbing aural effects — footsteps on a sandy beach, flapping bird wings — onto pieces of film footage. But the three are also involved in a love triangle: the curly-brown-haired Anna (Virginie Efira), who is romantic partners with the older head of production (Vincent Cassel), is seeing her younger co-worker (Pierre Niney) on the sly. We watch this and think: Okay, so what? But it turns out that the triangle we’re observing is already Sylvie’s fictionalized version of what she saw through the telescope.

Since Sylvie hasn’t exactly been taking good care of herself, her niece, Céline (India Hair), who owns half the apartment, sets her up with a young drifter, Adam (Adam Bess), who rescued Céline from a subway pickpocket. The doleful, scruffy Adam cleans the apartment (though he also shepherds a family of mice), and he then takes Sylvie’s abandoned manuscript — the fictional scenario we’ve been watching — and palms it off as his own. He gives it to a woman named Nita (also played by Virginie Efira, now blonde), who he meets at a coffeeshop. He wants her to read the manuscript, even as the film now segues into showing us the real version of what’s been going on in that apartment. (It’s less racy, though it still involves a lurch toward adultery.) Are we having brain spasms yet?

The most baffling dimension of “Parallel Tales” is how little life there is to the characters outside of these fiction-vs.-reality gambits. It’s not that the actors are bad. Vincent Cassel invests Pierre with a no-longer-young sense of regret, and Virginie Efira, in her double role, makes you feel the sharpness of Nita’s pain in contrast to Anna’s more libertine ‘tude. Yet none of this comes to much. When Nita rebuffs the advances of the lightweight cad Christophe (who’s Pierre’s brother), that’s the one focused emotion in the movie — a woman rejecting workplace harassment. No problem there, but it feels like a different film. 

In an abstract way, Farhadi is looking back to films like “Rear Window” and “Blow-Up” and “The Conversation,” as well as De Palma’s “Blow Out” and “Body Double.” But those movies, in different ways, were about trickery and deceit, about drawing the audience into a head game of perception. (“Blow-Up,” 60 years ago, was one of the movies that made art cinema fun, while “Body Double,” preposterous as it is, is vintage guilty-pleasure De Palma.) In “Parallel Tales,” Farhadi doesn’t play the audience so much as stymie it with the obliqueness of his storytelling. The movie manages to be rigorously muddled despite not being all that complicated. Maybe that’s because the tales it tells are parallel, all right. It feels like they’re competing to underwhelm you.

4/5 stars

With a story driven by beautifully restrained emotions and conversations steeped in philosophical queries about the meaning and significance of art, the Franco-Japanese co-production Nagi Notes combines the best of the two cinematic worlds it was born out of.

Playing in the Cannes Film Festival’s main competition, Nagi Notes is based on Japanese playwright Oriza Hirata’s Tokyo Notes, a play revolving around 20 characters sitting in a museum hall talking about their lives while a devastating war rages in faraway Europe.

In Fukada’s very loose adaptation of the 1994 play – which retains only two of the original characters and removes the spatial confines in Hirata’s Beckett-ish narrative – war and its imitations are also omnipresent.

On television, they see the devastation in Ukraine; up close, they contend with military trucks rumbling past their homes and the constant boom of regular drills taking place at a nearby training camp.

After watching his mother perform in a production of “A Raisin in the Sun” at Compton Community College when he was 9 years old, Anthony Anderson knew appearing on stage would be his life’s work. Over the next handful of years, he enrolled in programs across Los Angeles to achieve that dream. Then, one morning after finishing a class at the Southern California Regional Occupational Center in Torrance, Anderson saw a Post-It note on a bulletin board that caught his attention. The note informed aspiring artists about a newly formed arts school. To be admitted, they had to submit an audition tape.

“I ripped it off the board, and I brought it home to my mother, and I said, ‘Mom, if I can get into this school, can I go here?’” Anderson says. “She said, ‘If you can get into that, yes.’”

Months later, Anderson received a letter informing him that he had been accepted into the inaugural class at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts.

Founded in 1984 and opening its doors to students in 1985, Los Angeles County High School for the Arts is located on the campus of Cal State L.A. It was established to provide students (currently 550) with conservatory-level arts training and college-prep academics within the public education system. LACHSA isn’t associated with LAUSD; instead, it partners with the Los Angeles County Office of Education, which provides funding to support it.

“I felt it to be very important that I was in an environment where other students had the same passion as I did for the arts, in particular, theater,” Anderson says. “Being around other students who had the same passion and drive that I had as an artist was very influential.”

Over the years, LACHSA has featured a who’s who of alumni across various disciplines, including musicians Phoebe Bridgers and Haim, actors Jenna Elfman and Belissa Escobedo, and visual artists Robert Vargas, Tomashi Jackson and Kehinde Wiley. For the past seven years, the school has been ranked as the top public high school for the arts.

While the school’s accolades focus on the arts, LACHSA also aims to give its students experiences that extend beyond the program. Days are structured so that students take academic classes in the morning and arts in the afternoon. With this format, they meet and get to know classmates from other disciplines.

Former “SNL” cast member Taran Killam points out that this also promotes the school’s social and economic diversity, acting as a mini-college experience.

“It’s such a melting pot, but you have this beautiful, focused bonding,” he says. “It’s a rare thing for kids to know, but LACHSA students are ambitious. It’s very unifying when your background is so disparate and so diverse. It’s what makes it special, and you can’t get this experience in a traditional school.”

Lara Raj attended several arts-focused high schools as she moved during her childhood. With that in mind, the member of the girl group Katseye cites LACHSA as having a major influence on her artistic development. During her time at LACHSA, Raj took music, fashion and acting classes, and says its music tech class was her favorite. There, she learned how to create beats and write songs.

“I developed my songwriting and fell in love with it through those classes,” Raj says. “I was excited to go to school every day. And I hate school.”

Before attending LACHSA, singer-actor Josh Groban didn’t know a school specializing in the arts was an option. After bouncing around schools and realizing he needed a different education to express himself equally academically and artistically, he ended up at LACHSA. There, he found like-minded, artistically inclined outsiders.

Josh Groban, a former student of LACHSA, credits the institution with helping him find his voice.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

“I was a kid who didn’t quite know how to fit in,” Groban says. “Then at [LACHSA], I was surrounded by other students who, I think, didn’t know how to fit in either. We were there for the same reasons, which is that we felt like we needed the nourishment of the arts and being able to express ourselves on a daily basis.”

Half of LACHSA’s funding is provided by the state, with the rest provided by the LACHSA Foundation, a registered 501(c) (3). According to its executive director, Trena Pitchford, the foundation has invested $1 million each school year.

“People always ask me when I tell them I went to LaGuardia and to LACHSA if they were private schools,” Raj says. “I tell them it was created by people who are passionate about the arts and want to inspire kids.”

“There’s a part of LACHSA that I think is a discovery point for a lot of Los Angeles County, and even the nation,” Pitchford says. “There’s so much opportunity for the school, and they’re doing it on a limited budget. What would happen if they were fully funded? What would happen if the foundation had a $40 million endowment? That would fully sustain what they’re doing right now.”

LACHSA students posing in front of the entrance to the Greek Theatre

(Courtesy of LACHSA)

LACHSAPalooza, the culmination of the foundation’s two-year fundraising campaign to celebrate the first 40 years of LACHSA, will take place at the Greek Theatre on May 30. There, student artists will perform alongside Ozomatli, Jon B., April Showers and more. From a fundraising standpoint, the foundation has high hopes of raising $2.5 million.

“We have both annual goals in terms of investment as well as sort of big visions, big dreams of where we think LACHSA could go for the next 40 years,” Pitchford says. “We also hope to put LACHSA on the national stage.’

The honorees for the night are the late Pat Bass, LACHSA’s gospel choir director, retiring LACHSA theater department chair Lois Hunter, and Jerry Freedman, a longtime social studies teacher at the school.

For Anderson, who is serving as the night’s host, seeing Freedman recognized is very meaningful.

“He was there from the school’s beginning,” Anderson says. “He was there when I started, and he’s still there and is still beloved by the students 40-plus years later. I’m looking forward to honoring him.”

As an arts-based school in the long-standing entertainment capital of the U.S., LACHSA can educate and enable the next generation of artists to discover their voices in the backyards of production companies, studios and record labels.

“The freedom that a LACHSA student gets on the campus to discover who they are is exciting,” Pritchard says. “It’s very innovative, very creative, and it’s forward thinking, future forward. It’s an exciting and thrilling place to be.”

Alumni agree. Without LACHSA and, in turn, a focused public arts education, pursuing a career in the arts would have been more difficult and more costly.

“It helps develop souls to be fully fledged human beings who feel like they can go off into the world and be the best versions of themselves,” Groban says. “We all felt like we were free to be who we wanted to be.”

“Specialty-focused high schools like LACHSA, be it arts or any other topic deserving of protection, because it is a gathering place for exceptionally talented, ambitious, driven kids,” Killam says. “And aren’t those the kind of people we want to be cultivating in society?”