A Separation | Review

Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s deeply involving A Separation manages to absorb the audience in a tangled domestic whodunit sparked by the break-up of a 14-year marriage, while also engaging them in a conscious dialogue about the thorny moral choices the characters are forced to make. Perfect consonance between the art and camera departments allows Farhadi and cinematographer Mahmood Kalari to shoot family members through windows, doorways, and marbled glass dividers, spatially emphasizing their internal disconnect. Lack of a musical score highlights Farhadi’s resistance to passing any kind of verdict on the characters, who are all angled against each other for their own, often concealed, motives. Still, the director isn’t above swaying audience allegiance to and fro with carefully positioned plot developments and expository reveals. At the heart of this scrupulously empathetic drama is how the bonds of familial affection — between father and daughter, wife and husband, son and father — can be assailed by personal desires, economic demands and social proscription.

A mystery where even the crime itself is in question, Farhadi’s story examines the disturbing ease with which compassionate, well-meaning people can find themselves in dire conflict with one another. Young middle-class wife Simin has spent a year trying to wrangle a traveling visa, and now that she has it she wants to take her precocious adolescent daughter Termeh to America. Husband Nader refuses to go with her because he doesn’t want to abandon his father, who needs constant care because of Alzheimer’s. They decide to split up, and with Simin moving temporarily to her mother’s, Nader needs to hire someone to look after his father while he’s at work. He hires the ultra-religious Razieh, who hides her pregnancy because she desperately needs the job to pay off her unemployed husband’s debts. Then an accident occurs, charges are brought, lies are told — and someone will have to take the fall.

Farhadi’s strongest gift is for the telling behavior, such as when a flustered Razieh calls her church to gauge the amount of sin she will accrue if she undresses a senile old man who has soiled himself. Or a scene at a gas station, where Nader lightly admonishes his daughter for getting shortchanged by the attendant, then smiles with pride as he watches her in the rearview mirror go back and stand her ground.

A Separation is not short on powerful, nuanced performances. Leila Hatami effortlessly shifts between Simin’s casual me-first petulance and the nagging pull of self-denying obligation. Though Farhadi never makes the explicit connection, her restless inconstancy reads as the inevitable consequence of her society’s oppressive status quo. Peyman Moadi as Nader is likably harassed; the audience relies on his father-figure moral center without feeling too dirty about it. As the fundamentalist Razieh, Sareh Bayat nicely embodies the paradox of resigned fatalism and white-knuckled persistence.

The character of Hodjat, Razieh’s disgruntled, working class husband, is slightly less convincing than the others. This is not just because of the actor (Shahab Hosseini never quite convinces us that he’s capable of going over the edge), but because the character isn’t enough of the irritant he needs to be. Hodjat is a social emblem of affronted need: he can’t get a job, he can’t get justice, he can’t get respect. He is the problem that everyone would prefer to ignore. He’s abrasive, wearying, like a car alarm that never gets turned off. Yet somehow Farhadi can’t bring himself to make Hodjat abrasive enough. This isn’t a surrender to audience-pacifying gloss, however, but only a side effect of Farhadi’s fundamental refusal to demonize.

Mirroring its subjects, the movie is imperfect. Lies big and small abound, but seemingly are never precipitated by selfishness; the overriding nobility and honesty of every character at times strains the viewer’s belief. Most conspicuously, Farhadi’s withholding, in a key instance, of essential plot information borders on a betrayal of his audience’s trust. But how can we not bring ourselves to forgive the author of a movie itself so preoccupied with, and cherishing of, the act of forgiveness?

Reviewed on October 8th at the 2011 New York Film Festival.

Rating 4 stars