add to our listingsMovie Review: A Separation
Austin360.com | Austin American-Statesman
Director Asghar Farhadi's gripping new film "A Separation" begins with a shot of Nader (Peyman Maadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) staring pleadingly into the eyes of the audience. Neither is innocent, yet neither is guilty.
The married couple have reached an impasse in their marriage. Simin wants to leave Iran and, after 18 months of bureaucratic maneuvering, they have acquired the necessary visas. Nader refuses, choosing instead to stay at home and care for his rapidly degenerating father.
Unable to leave the country alone as a married woman, Simin has filed for divorce. But the law will not permit one without evidence of abuse or equally catastrophic circumstances.
Voices rising, and faces contorted with mounting frustration, each makes his or her case to an off-camera judge. In the judge's stead sits the audience, asked to place blame and pass judgment on the nature of the couple's grievance.
The film's initial argument is indicative of the movie as a whole. Both characters make strong arguments, and there appear to be no clear answers, no good guy or bad guy. There lingers an undercurrent of emotion and backstory that goes unmentioned. And the audience is implicated from the beginning, charged with parsing truth and intention. The film is part marital drama, part thriller.
Simin moves out of the family's house while weighing her decision to leave the country, stranding the couple's confused daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi) with an easily aggravated but nurturing Nader. In Simin's absence, the family hires an acquaintance, Razieh (Sareh Bayat), to assist with caring for Nader's father, who has Alzheimer's disease.
A timid and staunchly devout woman, Razieh has trouble meeting the physical and emotional demands of the new job. When the tasks become too physically intimate, she consults with an imam and eventually quits her job.
Razieh offers her husband Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini) as a replacement, but the unemployed shoemaker is hustled off to jail for debts before he can take the job. Razieh returns to fill the role until her husband is freed, but before a transfer of responsibilities can occur, a bad decision by Razieh triggers a series of relatively innocuous events that spiral into chaos.
The director makes the turmoil in Nader's house palpable, as a handheld camera closely follows characters from room to room with urgency. Swift editing heightens the dramatic tension of the various arguments, as the camera cuts from one gesticulating character to the next, creating a kinetic visual pastiche.
Small ripples of lies compound into a tumultuous sea of confusion and distrust, and family members are pulled from one another as they wage their own internal wars of ethics.
The personal rifts in "A Separation" serve as metaphors for social unrest in Iran. Farhadi's film examines the way emigration and aspiration can disrupt families and shape a nation. Nader sees his wife as a coward for her willingness to leave her homeland, while Simin has contempt for her husband for clinging to something old and dying, a past exemplified by Nader's father. What Simin most desires from her husband is passion.
The conflict between the two couples also sheds light on the role of women, religion and class in modern Iran and offers a fascinating look at the vicissitudes of a harsh but pragmatic Iranian legal system. While the women make choices that instigate much of the drama, they are generally treated as pawns by the men. The women's honor is proffered by the men solely as a rhetorical tactic. Razieh and Hodjat find strength and guidance in their strict Islamic beliefs, while the more secular Nader and Simin condescend to the constraints of religious law. Neither couple has a firm hold on the moral high ground, and each couple tries to persuade the other of their basic humanity.
Tangled in the middle of the web of deceit are the couples' young daughters. Usually relegated to the periphery of the action, Termeh occasionally enters her parents' drama, pressing them to be honest with her and themselves. The guileless pre-teen holds a mirror up to her parents and represents guidance and possibility for the family and the country.
The truth is an ever-elusive thing for both the characters in "A Separation" and the audience. Each actor delivers a nuanced and emotionally charged performance and earns varying degrees of our sympathy. With each revelation, we are forced to question whom we believe and why, and never does Farhadi rely on overt emotional manipulation to engage the audience.
"A Separation" won the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film and will probably garner an Oscar later this month in the same category, but this film should not be appreciated simply as a "foreign film." Farhadi also received an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay, a prize won by a foreign-language film only five times in Oscar history, and the filmmaker deserves to walk home with that prize, as well. He has deftly crafted an intriguing work of art that offers no easy answers and portrays with stunning emotional depth the complications and secrecy of modern life in Iran. It is a difficult tale that should be familiar in any language.
modam@statesman.com; 912-5986
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Director Asghar Farhadi's gripping new film "A Separation" begins with a shot of Nader (Peyman Maadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) staring pleadingly into the eyes of the audience. Neither is innocent, yet neither is guilty. (Full review)