Everybody Knows (Todos lo saben) (2018)

May 8, 2018 (Cannes), September 14, 2018 (Spain), release dates

Directed by Asghar Farhadi

Screenplay by Asghar Farhadi

Music by Javier Limón

Edited by Hayedeh Safiyari

Cinematography by José Luis Alcaine

Penélope Cruz as Laura, Alejandro’s wife, Irene’s mother

Javier Bardem as Paco, Bea’s husband

Ricardo Darin as Alejandro, Laura’s husband and Irene’s father

Bárbara Lennie as Bea, Paco’s wife

Inma Cuesta as Ana, Laura’s younger sister

Elvira Minguez as Mariana, Laura’s older sister and Fernando’s wife

Eduard Fernández as Fernando

Ramón Barea as Antonio, Ana’s, Mariana’s, and Laura’s father and Irene’s grandfather

Sara Sálamo as Rocío, Fernando’s and Mariana's daughter

Paco Pastor Gómez as Gabriel, Rocío’s husband

Carla Campra as Irene, Laura’s and Alejandro’s daughter

Iván Chavero as Diego, Laura’s and Alejandro’s son

Roger Casamajor as Joan, Ana’s fiancé

José Ángel Egido as Jorge, a retired police officer

Tomás del Estal as Andrès, co-owner of the vineyard and Paco’s business partner

Sergio Castellanos as Felipe, Irene’s Spanish friend

Jaime Lorente as Luis

Distributed by Focus Features

Produced by Memento Films, Morena Films, Lucky Red

This blog post about Everybody Knows contains almost all the spoilers. The cast list above includes relationships among characters to help readers (and me!) keep track.

Throughout the time that I watched this film, I kept asking myself the obvious question, “Everybody knows what?” It seems everyone in the village where the film takes place knows that Irene is Laura and Paco’s daughter. Fernando tells Laura’s husband Alejandro this bit of information more than halfway into the film. That’s when viewers learn the secret, but Alejandro has known it all along. Somebody had to have known that fact to want to send messages demanding ransom to Laura, Irene’s mother, and to Bea, Paco’s wife. Paco is Laura’s ex-lover; Irene is the one who has been kidnapped.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The opening credits appear over old, large dusty clockworks and scratched graffiti on the stone walls of a bell tower. In addition to housing the bells of the village’s church, the bell tower is a sanctuary for lovers to find some privacy and get away from prying eyes. But the graffiti they leave behind lets everyone else know what they’re doing anyway. I should say that the graffiti only confirms what everybody suspects: It’s almost impossible to keep secrets in a small village, and this helps explain why “everybody knows.”

After the credits, the film cuts to an overhead shot of a street cleaner in the quiet public square of the village, then cuts to someone wearing plastic gloves and cutting out articles about the disappearance of a young girl named Carmen a couple of decades ago. Then the film switches abruptly to someone holding a cell phone outside the sunroof of a moving car, taking pictures of the surroundings. This person is Irene, and she is showing her father, who is on the phone in Argentina, where she is and what she is doing. Ana is driving, and Laura, Ana’s sister, is in the front passenger seat. In the backseat are Diego and Irene, Laura’s and Alejandro’s children (Alejandro is the one on the phone and the only family member who is not in Spain for the wedding). Ana has picked up Laura and her children at the airport because she is getting married, and Laura, her children, and several other family members are returning to the village to attend the wedding. All of the subsequent family meetings and reunions are pleasant and easy; the extended family certainly gives the impression of being a loving one.

But there is the missing Carmen from years ago. Viewers don’t know who she is and how she is related to the current group of relatives gathering for Ana’s wedding. Thus, a feeling of unease and uncertainty is injected almost from the start, although it’s possible to forget it because the introductions to the family members and their relatives involve a lengthy sequence, and viewers are immersed in the wedding celebration once it gets underway.

The night of the wedding, however, Irene is abducted. The kidnappers leave the newspaper clippings about Carmen’s abduction on Irene’s empty bed. Laura learns that Carmen was eventually strangled and thrown down a well, but there is still no tangible connection made between Carmen and Irene or any members of Irene’s family. Laura gets a text saying that the kidnappers have her daughter and that they will kill her if Laura calls the police. Still, no one is sure if the two abductions are somehow connected. Laura, Paco, Paco’s wife Bea, and Fernando (Laura’s brother-in-law) look for Irene, but they have no luck finding her. Irene needs her asthma medications and can’t go for too long without them, which only adds to the escalating tension.

Jorge is a retired police officer that Fernando consults about Irene’s disappearance and to review the wedding video for clues. Jorge is the one who suggests that someone who knows the family probably committed the crime. The kidnappers had to have known in advance that Laura and her children would be in the village because the kidnapping took some planning. The electricity to the house was purposely cut during the wedding celebration, when everyone was preoccupied. Thus, the kidnappers must have known several details about the wedding, too.

The rest of the film covers the family’s plan to get Irene back. Everyone has to be considered a suspect, which only increases tensions between family members and in the plot. Eventually, Irene is returned home, but only one family member has any idea who the kidnappers are. Laura’s older sister Mariana has suspected her daughter Rocío since she saw Rocío returning late one night with wet jeans and muddy shoes. Mariana keeps her suspicions about her daughter to herself until the end of the film, when Mariana tells her husband Fernando that they need to talk. Fernando sits down at an outside table with Mariana, and the film fades to white.

At first, I thought that Everybody Knows wasn’t terribly noir-ish, but I’ve since changed my mind. In fact, viewers aren’t completely sure what Mariana will tell Fernando. I was—and still am—fairly certain that she tells her husband the truth. But even if she does, I have no idea how Fernando will react or what he and Mariana will decide to do, together or separately. The more I thought about the film, the more uncertain I was about the ending, and that ambiguity is definitely a noir characteristic.

But if you are thinking that the characters are hard to keep track of, you aren’t the only one. I thought the same. Seeing the film again would probably make it easier to follow who is related to whom. The cast list provided at the beginning of this post includes familial relationships, some of which I was able to find on Wikipedia. Even with the list, figuring out everyone’s relationship to everyone else is difficult. I don’t speak Spanish (I watched the film on DVD, which showed the entire film in Spanish with English subtitles), but I don’t think the translation presented any difficulty.

Like many films noir from years ago, Everybody Knows is a film where the details are important. It’s crucial to keep track of the characters and the plot details. Details are revealed as necessary: They come up as part of the plot and in conversation, woven throughout the way actual people would learn them or say them—and thus reveal them—to others.

I’m sure that a second viewing would reveal even more about the plot and the characters, and it would also put me in a different role. On first viewing, viewers could be cast members because they are learning the clues as the characters do. Suspicion is cast on the grape pickers in the vineyard, the wedding videographers, Laura, Paco, Alejandro. Characters and viewers don’t know who to believe or who to trust.

Only once, far along in the narrative, do viewers learn a vital clue before almost all of the other characters in the film: They learn who is responsible for the kidnapping. And it is someone related by blood: Rocío, Mariana and Fernando’s daughter, and her husband Gabriel. Mariana is Laura’s older sister, which makes Rocío Laura’s niece and Irene’s cousin. Jorge, the retired police officer, was right after all.

Operation Terror (Book) (1960)

Operation Terror, by the Gordons

Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1960

List of main characters:

Kelly Sherwood, teller at the Hollywood First National Bank

Eloise “Toby” Sherwood, Kelly’s sister

John “Rip” Ripley, FBI agent

Peg, FBI receptionist

Nancy Ashton, call girl

Louella Hendricks, Toby’s high school friend

Jack, Toby’s boyfriend

Captain Frank Moreno, Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), robbery division

Jim “Popcorn” Durga, the police informer

Red Dillon

Sheri Kimura, Red Dillon’s girlfriend

Joey Kimura, Sheri Kimura’s son

Operation Terror was a fun read. The narrative revolves around Kelly Sherwood, a bank teller at the Hollywood First National Bank, who is targeted by Red Dillon because of her access to the bank’s money. He blackmails her into stealing thousands of dollars, and he threatens her and her teenage sister, Toby, with sexual assault and death if she doesn’t comply. Chapter 1 begins with Red Dillon attacking Kelly Sherwood in her garage after she comes home from work, and the tension continues to escalate throughout the narrative as Dillon tests Sherwood’s resolve with threats and diversions. The story certainly has many noir characteristics: the threat of violence, blackmail, robbery—and nonstop tension.

Experiment in Terror is a film based on Operation Terror, and seeing the film inspired me to read the novel. It’s short: The total number of pages is 192, and that includes blank pages and all the front matter (title page, copyright page, and so on). The authors, the Gordons, are Gordon Gordon and Mildred Nixon Gordon. I never realized that John Ripley is a recurring character in their novels (five, to be exact) or that two Ripley novels were adapted for film.

◊ Click here for more information about the authors and their publications.

◊ Click here for my blog post about Experiment in Terror.

(This blog post about the novel Operation Terror contains all the spoilers.)

I read the novel because I thought it would fill in some of the gaps presented in the film version. In Experiment in Terror, for instance, Nancy Ashton’s connection to Garland Lynch and to Kelly Sherwood is never made clear; Agent Ripley offers a guess that Ashton probably found herself in a position similar to Kelly Sherwood’s but nothing more. Lisa Soong’s (Sheri Kimura in the novel) connection to Lynch (Red Dillon in the novel) seems to be based solely on the fact that he has a predilection for Asian women, but that doesn’t explain his willingness to pay for her son’s numerous and expensive medical bills. Neither the film nor the novel offers anything more about these points, so readers (and viewers of the film) are left wondering about these loose ends.

Differences between the Novel and the Film

◊ The setting in the novel is Los Angeles. In the film, it is San Francisco.

◊ In the novel, Nancy Ashton is a call girl, and she dies falling off the balcony of her apartment building. In the film, she designs retail store mannequins, and she is strangled in her own apartment.

◊ A friend of Nancy Ashton’s, Deborah Samuelson, is interviewed by the FBI in the novel. This character doesn’t exist in the film.

◊ In the novel, Red Dillon asks Kelly Sherwood to meet him at the Angel Flight cable car, a famous Los Angeles landmark. In the film, he arranges to meet her at the Roaring Twenties nightclub.

◊ Sheri Kimura in the novel becomes Lisa Soong in the film. Kimura goes under surveillance in her own apartment by two FBI agents and a police officer in the novel, but this doesn’t happen in the film.

◊ Red Dillon (Red Lynch in the novel) calls John Ripley at his FBI office. He never makes this call in the film.

◊ Kelly Sherwood is instructed by Red Dillon to take his phone call for additional instructions at a pay phone at the Hollywood Bowl. In the film, he instructs her to go to a pay phone at the Fisherman’s Wharf.

◊ In the novel, Dillon’s instructions at the pay phone include a cab ride to the Coliseum, and the story ends in the stands at a Los Angeles Rams–Baltimore Colts football game. In the film, the story ends at Candlestick Park on the baseball field.

Operation Terror differs from the film in other ways that I found striking. The novel includes some comparisons between the work of law enforcement and that of the military. For example, John Ripley can sympathize with Kelly Sherwood by comparing her to a soldier on the battlefield:

She [Kelly Sherwood] interrupted. “If I have to sit around waiting—”

He [John Ripley] nodded sympathetically. It was the waiting that broke most victims, the same as it broke soldiers on the battlefield. (page 160)

Operation Terror also included some details to explain Sheri Kimura’s hesitancy about helping the FBI. In fact, Agent Ripley finds her hostility inexplicable:

Rip said, “I don’t get it. You [Sheri Kimura] were hostile to us even before we told you what we wanted.”

                “You bet I was.”

                “Why, Miss Kimura?”

                “Does Christmas 1941 mean anything to you?”

                He thought the date over. “Offhand, it doesn’t What does it mean to you?”

                “I’ll tell you what it means to me. I was twelve years old and I had the world. I had the greatest dad any girl ever had. My mom died when I was four, and he’d brought me up with all the love in his heart. We were very close—very close.”

                She swallowed, fighting emotion, and Rip waited.

                After a second she continued, “That day my world crashed. We were given a few days to get ready. The government was packing us off to a concentration camp. My government, the flag I’d loved. Packing us off because of the color of our skin. We were American, mister, but we didn’t have the right kind of skin. A yellow skin might be a spy, a traitor.” All the resentment harbored for years spilled out. “My dad lost ’most everything. He sold palm trees for ten bucks that had cost him a hundred, and shrubs for a quarter that he’d paid a dollar for. Because you don’t go off and leave a nursery for three years.

                “So they put us under guard in a place in Arizona, behind barbed wire and with rifles ready to shoot us down if we tried to get out. They didn’t have any chambers where they could put us to death, but he died anyway, brokenhearted, still loving the only land, the only country he’d ever known, But I swore when they put him in the ground—I swore—”

                Reliving the scene, she broke. Rip looked away.

                Rip knew that most Japanese-Americans had returned to their homes after World War II bearing no grudges. They were perhaps the only people in all history who had been so treated and who forgave their oppressors so readily. They decided that what was past was past and they must fit themselves to a new era.

                All except a few.

Rip said. “That was eighteen years ago, Miss Kimura, and Red Dillon’s today, and there’s absolutely no connection.” He continued, “What’s more, if I remember rightly, it was military order, and an action which the Department of Justice opposed from the time it was suggested. The FBI never made any request for such relocation.” He paused a moment. “Believe me, I understand how you feel, but your thinking’s all wrong. Please give this some study—and talk with your attorney about it.” (pages 134–135)

Sheri Kimura is suspicious of all government authority, and John Ripley works for a federal agency. She is generalizing; he hopes that she can have some faith in one specific part of the federal government. He doesn’t remember anything about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, but he didn’t experience anything remotely like it. The text seems to imply that, if so many Japanese Americans could get over their unjust treatment and internment, why can’t Sheri Kimura? But I find that argument disingenuous. If you want any proof that people can forgive but they do not and may not want to forget, examine George Takei’s writings on the very same subject (click on each book title for more information):

◊ To the Stars: The Autobiography of George Takei, Star Trek's Mr. Sulu

◊ They Called Us Enemy

Click here for George Takei’s October 23, 2019, interview on PBS NewsHour.

The ending of Operation Terror is a bit smug in the way that it treats its main characters as heroes, but it does acknowledge one of the core themes of noir in film and in literature: that evil is omnipresent, a fact of life.

Rip watched as Kelly got into the Bureau car that would take her home. She raised her hand to him as the car pulled away, and smiled, and in her smile was the kind of strength and gentleness he liked in a woman. She was America to him—she and Toby.

The man [Red Dillon] stretched out up there in the Coliseum, he was America, too, unfortunately.

“Well, it’s over,” Rip said to Bradley [fellow FBI agent]. Over for Kelly Sherwood, he thought, but tomorrow another criminal somewhere would reach out to use an innocent person in another Operation Terror. (page 191)

Kelly Sherwood is calm and composed throughout her ordeal. She helps the FBI; she drew them in from the beginning and continued to rely on them until the case was resolved. She is offered up as the ideal that every American man would want to have waiting for him at home, back in the 1960s. The fact that she is in her twenties and has already endured the death of both parents in an accident only adds to her mystique and strength. She is a success—and Sheri Kimura, by implication, is not.

The quotation above also acknowledges the reality of work for Agent John Ripley. The case is over for Kelly Sherwood, but Ripley and his coworkers will likely face another dangerous criminal—and soon—in their line of work.

The attitudes presented by some of the characters should seem outdated today. The novel was published in 1960, sixty years ago, in a very different time, so it’s disheartening to realize that some things haven’t changed all that much. I enjoyed reading Operation Terror, however, in spite of the attitudes presented in the novel. I guess, in addition to being entertained, it doesn’t hurt to learn that we still have some work to do.