In 2013, Iran’s Asghar Farhadi gave European artistic film a potency and purity it once had for several decades beginning in the late Fifties. I’m referring to the French-language picture The Past, set in Paris and built around several Middle Eastern migrants and one French woman, Marie-Ann.

Director Farhadi, who wrote the screenplay, has little respect for Marie-Ann (Berenice Bejo) even as he recognizes her humanity. The woman is pregnant by Samir (Tahar Rahim), the Arab man with whom she has been having an affair. This has followed Marie-Ann’s request for a divorce from another man (Ali Mosaffa)—all of which is due to Marie-Ann and Samir being creatures of quiet lust. The plot is pivoted on the question of whether the illicit affair compelled Samir’s wife to commit suicide.

The cast is expert. Bejo could probably never be false if she wanted to. The film is directorially not brilliant but certainly solid. It is as strong an “art film” as Il Posto (1961) or Betty (1992), giving no quarter, as it scrutinizes the theme of when divorce, however inevitable, fails to bring finality.

(In French with English subtitles)

It would appear that late Sixties Italy, like all other countries, needs reform. It can’t happen without the rule of law, and men in power ought never to be “above suspicion” for a serious offense. A police inspector who oddly murders his mistress, Augusta, knows he probably is; but doesn’t want to be.

This is Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), by Italy’s Elio Petri. Surely this is not meant to be satire, for if it is, it’s a bad film. Satire is comic and hyperbolic; Petri’s film is just hyperbolic (to an extent). It is a weird political drama, memorably made. Actor Gian Maria Volonte, as the police inspector, is outstanding at being a crazy-like-a-fox fellow and tough guy. Virile and forceful, his presence in the film is absolutely needed. Compellingly Florinda Bolkan plays Augusta. The movie’s young revolutionaries are trite now, even if Investigation is an interesting study of power and justice.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

A married woman with stepchildren participates in a crime with her new male lover. The woman in question narrates this short story by the Italian author Alberto Moravia called “The Other Side of the Moon.”

The woman is a bank teller; she helps to rob the bank. The story is about self-alienation in everyday living. The woman comments that she is “detached from the things I am doing at the very moment that I’m doing them.” Actions against traditional values may be another trope. Included in The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, “Moon” is a trenchant five and a half pages. A palpably secular piece, it offers no moral significance but does offer profundity.