A Separation
Written and Directed
By: Asghar Farhadi
Starring: Peyman Moaadi,
Leila Hatami, Sareh Bayat, Sarina Farhadi, Shahab Hosseini, Merila Zare’i,
Ali-Asghar Shahbazi, and Babak Karimi
Director of Photography: Mahmoud Kalari, Editor: Hayedeh
Safiyari, Production Designer: Keyvan Moghaddam, Original Music: Sattar Oraki
The political state of Iran might
feel like the elephant in the room in Asghar Farhadi’s masterful A
Separation, but the film cloyingly acknowledges its Western spectators
during the opening sequence. We watch from the point of view of a judge as a
man and woman come for a divorce. Simin (Leila Hatami) wants to leave the state
and because her husband Naader (Peyman Moaadi) won’t join her, she wants a
divorce. She tells the judge she doesn’t want to raise her daughter in such a
state. When the judge asks her to describe what is wrong with the state of
Iran, she acts ambivalently toward the question. The truth, we later learn, is
that she has no intention of leaving, and it is actually a much smaller, but in
many ways, much greater difficulty that haunts her.
That’s
the crux of why Mr. Farhadi’s film is a much more human drama than anything
else. Obviously in the United States, it is difficult to watch a film like A
Separation without commenting on the tyrannical power that might be
lingering just below the surface. But perhaps let’s consider the narrative and
style on the terms the film wants to subscribe. Few films, even those by
masterful Iranian directors like Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, give a
really day-to-day life or Iran and the issues that face those who never take to
the streets. What we thus find in A Separation is a wondrously observed
legal drama that provides endless complexity and moral quandaries that offer no
easy answers.
That divorce
becomes the catalyst for a number of issues that evolve from their crumbling
marriage, starting with the emotional state of their young daughter Termeh,
played by Mr. Farhadi’s own daughter Shahab. Termeh goes against her mother’s
will and stays with her father, who has his own issues to deal with,
particularly a father with severe Alzheimer’s with no time to care for him.
Naader ends up hiring a woman named Razieh (Sareh Bayat) to care for the man,
though she seems like a bad choice from the beginning. Razieh has a young
daughter to look after, and must travel long hours to get to Naader’s home.
Additionally, she worries about breaking religious code when she realizes she
must clean and change Naader’s father, and cannot tell her husband about the
job because it will shame him.
Things
come to a breaking point, a stunning reveal than tailspins the film into a
series of devastating legal sequences that ask questions of guilt, knowledge,
and truth. To discuss the real pathos behind Mr. Farhadi’s sublimely
constructed screenplay would devolve into spoiler territory, but the film plays
loose and fast with our identification of who is right, who is wrong, and what
the solution could possibly be. Mr. Moaadi plays Naader with a stern and hollow
face without much sign of warmth, but draws a sympathetic portrayal of a man
pushed against his principles with stern power. The performance includes a lot
of shouting, but Mr. Moaadi gives so much subtlety in how we should understand
his character, that it is truly as remarkable as an English performance of the
year (Move over Michael Fassbender!). As Naader fights for his case, hoping
truth will prevail, Mr. Farhadi keeps us in limbo about details.
Under
another director, the melodrama that drives A
Separation may have come off as over-the-top and illogical, and the way it
hides details until their later reveal could come off as unjustly calculated.
But leave it to the naturalistic style of Mr. Farhadi to keep us highly
involved in the nature. Like that opening shot suggests, we are the impartial
observers of this drama, and the camera often is cluttered in the back, with
objects or door frames taking over parts of the shot. In doing so, Mr. Farhadi
attempts to keep us at arm’s length from the truth until we are ready. That is
not to say he won’t give us a close up when needed—he knows how to compose
beautiful frames by using frames and distance between his actors that speaks
volumes about their relationships. And one shot in particular, a simple
close-up on Termeh after she is forced to tell a lie left me in pieces.
As A Separation begins to culminate, the issues on hand left me floored
onto whom I should identify with in the situation, and what was the ultimately
right thing. Most thankfully, A Separation never patronizes its viewers
with big speeches or allegorical signs of a greater problem, keeping itself to
the intimacy of its complex characters. Mr. Farhadi, best known for his
previous film About Elly (a winner at the Tribeca Film Festival but
never released theatrically in the states), knows that the drama is enough to
debate, and his open ending might feel trite through another lens, but provides
us with a final moment to contemplate what we’ve seen.
Using glass often as a framing
reference, this isn’t just a film about a separation by divorce, but the
separations between generations, religions, and economic classes. The second
time I saw A Separation, I noticed
how near the end of the film, one character smashes a window, leaving a huge
hole in the glass. That glass that tries to keep these characters distanced from
each other, always contained in their small worlds, cannot stay bound up
forever.
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