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.
