Film Review: “A Separation”

OUT OF 4

Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s fifth feature is a brilliantly conceived and executed piece of cinematic art.  It is a courtroom drama which will leave you thinking about the fragility of human life and the consequences of even the most simplest of actions.  It is the odds-on favorite to win the 2012 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film and it is a contemporary masterpiece.

It begins by thrusting the viewer into a judicial hearing in which an upper- middle class husband and wife are arguing about a petition for divorce in front of a judge who is unseen but all-powerful.  The wife named Simin (Leila Hatami) has documents that allow her family to leave the country, but her husband Nader (Peyman Moaadi) objects and feels he must stay for his aged, Alzheimer’s-afflicted father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi).

The wife must win the lawsuit to get her way, and, in a patriarchal country like Iran that is no easy task. Ultimately the judge dismisses her by stating that her problem is a “small one”. Thus, begins the “separation” and the ensuing custody battle for their studious 11-year old-daughter, Termeh ((Sarina Farhadi, the director’s daughter).

Simin leaves the family apartment to her husband and moves in with her mother (Shirin Yazdanbakhsh). Soon the difficult regimen of caring for his sickly father forces Nader to hire a caregiver Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a religious young woman with a 4-year-old daughter (Kimia Hosseini). Thus begins the complexities of a situation which will ultimately set up a series of dramatic events which challenge the nature of modernity, religion, loyalty, truth, integrity and freedom

Rather than reveal the conundrum one must go for the ride that Farhadi has intricately constructed. With a mise en scene consisting of mostly medium close-ups and a peripatetic camera we feel like a “fly-on-the wall” as the ensemble, naturalistic acting sucks us into a micro- vortex of today’s Iran.  We see the secular intelligentsia trying to live with a superstitious devout working class dependent on living with the constraints of fundamentalism.

It all boils down to Renoir’s famous line from “Rules of the Game” that “everyone has their reasons”.  The real miracle is that Iran has allowed this film an international platform. At last summer’s Telluride Film Festival, Fahardi was asked how authorities granted him permission to release the film and he eloquently answered as follows: “Censorship in a country like mine is a little bit like autumn weather.  There may be rain in the morning, then sun later.  I can only guess that my film came before the censors when the sun was shining.  It may also have helped that I haven’t judged anyone in it”.

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