Countless exceptional films have been made in which voyeurism — whether practiced by the protagonist or the audience — is a significant component. Think Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Polanski’s The Tenant, Haneke’s Caché, Coppola’s The Conversation and Powell’s Peeping Tom for starters, or at the more delectably lurid end of the spectrum, De Palma’s Body Double and Dressed to Kill. Asghar Farhadi’s elegant but frustrating Parallel Tales (Histoires parallèles) treats voyeurism as a jumping-off point to reflect on the uneasy relationship between truth and imagination. But the film keeps circling itself, with diminishing traction.

The director and his sibling co-writer Saeed Farhadi loosely based their script on the sixth chapter of the great Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 10-part project for Polish television, Dekalog, an episode that was expanded to feature length and released theatrically in 1988 as A Short Film About Love. Running a fleet 86 minutes, that masterful feat of storytelling observes the love of a withdrawn young Warsaw post office worker for a beautiful, promiscuous woman living in an apartment directly across the street, where he watches her every night through a telescope.

In a film running a lethargic 2 hours 20 minutes, the Farhadis have kept only the set-up and composer Zbigniew Preisner’s delicate but hauntingly emotional score. However, not even that exquisite music can wring much feeling from this terminally underpowered movie, which plays less like a lived-in, full-bodied story than a bloated metafiction writing class assignment. 

The director of Oscar winners A Separation and The Salesman, Asghar Farhadi is a world-class artist who put his own distinctive stamp on the grown-up moral melodrama of marital and family conflict. 

His new film reaches for psychological complexity, but after an intriguing start, it bogs down in fussily over-complicated plotting as it traces the escalating entanglements of crotchety novelist Sylvie (Isabelle Huppert), drawing inspiration for her next book by training a telescope on the self-possessed beauty working in a Paris apartment across the street. In her fictional construct, Sylvie names the woman Anna (Virginie Efira), after her late mother. 

The problem is that all the various strands — the parallel tales — dilute our access to the characters, limiting their dimensions. One of the many strengths of the Kieślowski film is its tight focus on just two individuals, the watcher and the watched, with a couple of secondary characters hovering around the edges. When the voyeur and his subject begin physically to interact, there is low-key suspense, a hint of danger and a fatalistic romantic current fed by their growing mutual curiosity. Before he evolved into the more dream-like poetry of his later successes, The Double Life of Véronique and the Three Colours trilogy, Dekalog revealed Kieślowski to be an impeccable craftsman in the fine art of narrative distillation.

Another two or three drafts of distillation is exactly what the unwieldy Parallel Tales could have used. Sylvie is set up as the story’s fulcrum, but that role is largely usurped by Adam (Adam Bessa), a young homeless man hired by the novelist’s niece Céline (India Hair) to help pack up the apartment they co-own, readying it to be sold. Sylvie is as tetchy and aloof with Adam as she is with her niece; her monomaniacal focus on her work has allowed the place to become hopelessly cluttered and filthy, and Sylvie has zero interest in doing anything about it.

The most interesting new element Farhadi introduces is an emphasis on sound, something so often missing for the long-distance voyeur. “Anna” works as an old-fashioned analog foley artist, alongside a handsome young man the author names Christophe (Pierre Niney), adding sound effects that range from a squeaky mattress to footsteps in the sand to the gentle flapping of a bird’s wings. The sound engineer at the mixing console is dubbed Pierre (Vincent Cassel). 

In Sylvie’s story, Christophe is madly pining for Anna, even though she keeps pushing him away. But she does occasionally give in to the implorations of married Pierre, with whom she appears to have a history. That romantic triangle is about as flavorful as a week-old baguette. 

When Adam sneaks a read of Sylvie’s pages, he becomes obsessed with Anna, orchestrating ways to keep running into her and starting conversations. He also starts writing his own version of the story, which inevitably falls into Anna’s hands, and he learns their real names. Efira’s character is Nita, while Cassel and Niney are Nicolas and Théo, brothers not immune to sibling rivalry. When Théo/Christophe picks up on Adam’s interest in Nita/Anna, he reacts with hostility in a terrific altercation scene on a Metro platform.

But mostly, the intertwining threads just sit there, never coming together in any satisfying way or holding up as their own story within the story, despite how hard the writers work at showing that reality can inspire fiction but fiction can also bounce back to influence reality. 

Just to make things even messier and more over-plotted, Sylvie notices a light on for five days straight in an upper-floor apartment, reporting to the cops her concern that the old man who lives there might have died.

Sure enough, that old man was once the dashing young lover of Sylvie’s mother, and when seeing them together through the window across the street proved too much for her father, he took a suicidal leap off the balcony, in full view of his wife. Her screams still haunt the building according to some, which explains the faint sounds of a distressed woman that Pierre kept picking up on his headset earlier. This would appear to be an extension of Sylvie’s fiction, but by that time, I had well and truly stopped caring.

Parallel Tales has Farhadi’s characteristic polish and DP Guillaume Deffontaines, who has worked frequently with Bruno Dumont, lights the interiors beautifully, lending subtle golden tones to the fiction scenes. Naturally, it’s also a big plus to have such an assembly of magnetic actors, with especially solid work from Efira in dual roles. Catherine Deneuve turns up for a single scene (barely more than a cameo) to throw some haughtiness back at Huppert, playing Sylvie’s publisher and not at all bothering to hide how bored she is by the outline for the new novel. Girl, I feel you!

Plans reportedly are in early development for all ten Dekalog chapters (shaped around the Ten Commandments) to be remade. Let’s hope the standard improves.