Farhadi’s ‘A Separation’

Leila Hatami (Simin) and Peyman Moaadi (Nader)

After seeing Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, I joked to a friend that the movie is so good, I can’t believe it’s not French. While it’s true that the picture represents something the French often try — it’s an intimate psychological portrait of a family, with just a few, very good actors — A Separation succeeds on its own terms, too. I’m not the only one who enjoyed it: it’s received excellent reviews and appears poised to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. There’s not a lot I can add, except to say that you really owe it to yourself to see it.

One reason is the film’s portrayal of daily life in contemporary Tehran. Many of us (and I do include myself in that number) have limited exposure to anything Iranian other than news reports about nuclear programs Ahmadinejad’s provocations, followed by emotional/political diatribes about military responses. Our notions are limited, therefore, of what it’s like for rank-and-file Iranian citizens to live in the mullahs’ thrall.

Based on the evidence in A Separation, for Iranians like the central couple in this film, creature comforts are plentiful (microwave ovens! shiny cars!), and even for such secular, educated, even Westernized Iranians, it’s sometimes possible to go about one’s business without running afoul of the system. But there are hidden costs in such arrangements, and when Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moaadi) embark on their eponymous separation, every one of the major characters — rich and poor, young and old, devout and secular — is sucked into a maelstrom of moral compromise.

Sareh Bayat (Razieh)

A teacher, Simin is chafing already under the regime, dyeing her hair and wearing her headscarf almost casually, more like a fashion accessory than a legal requirement. Her reason for wanting divorce isn’t that Nader is a bad man, she explains, but that he’s preventing her from leaving the country with their daughter. She feels that young Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, the director’s daughter) can’t live up to her potential in Iran, but she punts when the off-camera judge asks her why, and she never says where she wants to move. (My guess is France, since Termeh is seen practicing her French.)

Likewise, Farhadi stops short of directly criticizing the regime, but his film contains many scenes that depict the Iranian legal system unflatteringly. Even the magistrate (Babak Karimi) seems frustrated by the restrictive structure and the endless wrangling. While much of the difficulty arises from the individual personalities involved, how can there be justice when everyone is somehow corrupted?

Sarina Farhadi (Termeh)

They’re also sympathetic, which in turn makes the film sometimes quite uncomfortable: we’re watching a car wreck in slow motion, and we’re also watching ourselves, or people with whom we can identify easily. The actors are attractive, and the naturalness of their art (as well as the fact that we in America are unlikely to have seen any of them much if ever) keeps drawing you in as if you were witnessing real lives in real conflict.

Ultimately, Farhadi’s reliance on a very jittery hand-held camera becomes a commentary in itself: nothing here is truly stable. The audience never really gets a long view, the visual equivalent of the broader perspective that the characters need and don’t get, either.

I’ve held back on plot details, because very little in A Separation plays out as you expect it to do, and that is one of its strengths. Suffice to say that Farhadi’s film will tell you something about modern Iran, but more than that, it will make you think: about politics, about morality, about people you know, and how they treat one another.

Shahab Hosseini (Hodjat)