FILM
REVIEW Family traumas span US-Iran
divide A
Separation written, produced and directed
by Asghar Farhadi Reviewed by Kaveh L
Afrasiabi
PALO ALTO, California - The idea
of art imitating life is exquisitely implemented
in the highly-acclaimed Iranian movie, A
Separation, which has been nominated for two
Oscars, Best Foreign Movie and the Best Original
Screenplay.
It is Asghar Farhadi's fifth
film, illuminating aspects of life and people in
Iran in a clear, precise and subtle form that is
bereft of symbolism and full of cinematic realism.
Like Farhadi's previous film, About
Elly, this movie offers a distinctively
Iranian buffet of class, cultural, normative and
psychological issues, some of which, like the
ethics of caring for
elders, are universal and
resonate with a global audience.
Both
films zoom in on the issue of truthfulness and
(in) convenient lies, although A Separation
is more restrained by comparison and, as a result,
somewhat inferior to About Elly, Farhadi's
finest film yet touching on taboo love, which has
grown more resonant with time.
Farhadi's
verite style - of projecting every day reality,
with all its complexities and dynamic tensions,
straight on the silver screen - is refreshingly
divorced from any directorial license notorious in
"new Iranian cinema". This enables him to make
subtle judgment on the various themes such as
gender relations and the role of religion and
secularism - ie, standard ingredients of tales of
"tradition versus modernity".
The movie
begins and ends with somber scenes at a family
court, but strictly speaking is not a "divorce
movie" as mistakenly labeled by some movie
critics. Its main protagonists, a middle-class
husband and wife, experience a separation,
motivated by their disagreement on emigrating out
of Iran, but throughout the movie the pair show
all the traits of a married couple maneuvering
with each other in the course of what appears as
(most likely) a temporary rupture.
Their
(intensely proto-intellectual) 11-year-old
daughter is given the choice to pick her guardian,
left ambiguous at the movie's conclusion, yet
sufficiently open to the suggestion that she has
her own scheme of how to reunite her parents.
For average Western viewers, accustomed to
the negative stereotyping of Iranian males as
pathologically patriarchal, thanks to the singular
contribution of the popular movie, Not Without
My Daughter, this movie presents a timely
correction. Offering a more sympathetic portrayal
of Iranian men, as well as Iranian women, it
steers clear of any hints of male chauvinism and
its dirty clutches of power and domination.
A fan of Harold Pinter, the British
playwright, Farhadi has infused Pinteresque
elements in A Separation. These include the
working-class anger and frustration of the other
husband in the movie, whose pregnant wife works as
caretaker for the main couple and their
Alzheimer-stricken elderly father - until she is
unceremoniously dismissed for dereliction of
duties.
From a crushingly ordinary
beginning, the movie evolves into a unique
melodrama that combines subtle glances and pauses
with a crisp dialogue that avoids any ideological
messages or noise; like Pinter's works, here the
pauses or glances are not simply the elements of
character portrayal, they are "freezes" of action
to indicate that we are witnessing another layer
of reality.
In his earnest fondness for
political neutrality, Farhadi nonetheless teases
us with a passing whisper at Iranian middle class'
political discontent - in the opening scene when
the estranged wife, played brilliantly by Leila
Hatami, reveals her preference that her child does
not grow up under the present "circumstance" in
Iran.
Her silence to the magistrate's
question of "what circumstance" is also revelatory
of a self-censorship by a modern middle class that
in some sense feels culturally squeezed, indeed
the only "symbolic" scene in the entire movie. In
the ensuing maelstrom, triggered by the accidental
tragedy befalling the female caretaker and her
unborn child, both couples discover a system of
equal justice treating them fairly and without
prejudice, a departure from the Western stereotype
of Iranian justice as archaic or rather barbaric.
This, together with the film's accurate
portrayal of the pull of faith influencing the
individual's behavior (eg, the female caretaker
consults with a religious dignitary as to whether
or not she can clean the sick elderly man and she
later sacrifices a substantial sum over a
religious principle) reflect a quasi-affirmation
of the status quo that is increasingly under
Western siege nowadays.
Simultaneously, in
his non-combative turn on faith, loyalty, law and
social stratification, Farhadi brings to light the
contemporary hardships of the Iranian working
class, which is bound to be magnified as a result
of comprehensive Western onslaught of sanctions
against Iran.
The only villains in the
movie are the objective circumstances, the fluid
contexts of social existence that trigger events,
accidents, and complex interactions, yet in terms
of the movie's zeitgeist, the context of
foreign-induced hardship forms the implicit
background, thus giving it an indirect political
urgency. Its Oscar nomination by the American
movie industry, hitherto more attuned to
Islamphobia and "clash of civilizations" than
tolerance of the Muslim "other" and civility, [1]
may be rightly viewed as a cultural or artistic
ceasefire that, hopefully, can jolt the American
decision-makers that their current warmongering
approach toward Iran is in dire need of
reconsideration.
In a certain sense, A
Separation deals with the cross-cultural gaps
or separations, interiorized in the context of
intra-family interactions between the middle class
and working class characters, and raises awareness
of the need for better understanding of the layers
of meaning that lie beneath the surface realities,
not unlike the philosophical discourse of Terrence
Malick in his latest movie, The Tree of
Life.
But while Malick is
characteristically American in his grand ambition
of disclosing the mystery of nature, cosmos and
humanity, Farhadi micro-focuses on the
Heideggerian Dasein of instant existence that is
simultaneously both mundane and electrifyingly
dynamic, causing the bumps and bruises of shifting
perceptions and character developments.
There are profound stylistic differences
between Farhadi and Malick, such as Malick's
overusage of soundtrack as an integral part of his
cinematic narrative, compared with Farhadi's
minimal reliance on music that reflects an
over-confidence in the ability of storyline to
carry the movie forward (an ambition that does not
work all the time).
Nevertheless, a
limited comparison between the two directors is
called for simply because of their distinct
abilities to focus on family relations and turn
the cinematic medium into a rich recipe for
thoughtful provocations. Together, these two
movies, made in separate continents, remind the
audience of the vital heartbeat of aesthetic
humanism that beats in the East and West.
A Separation
written, produced and directed by Asghar Farhadi.
Distributed by Film Iran (Iran). Sony Pictures
Classics (US) Memento Films (worldwide). Release
date(s) February 1, 2011 (Tehran Fajr Film
Festival), February 15, 2011 (Berlin Film
Festival). Box office: $3,100,000 (Iran),
$9,655,000 (worldwide).
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
The movie
begins and ends with somber scenes at a family
court, but strictly speaking is not a "divorce
movie" as mistakenly labeled by some movie
critics. Its main protagonists, a middle-class
husband and wife, experience a separation,
motivated by their disagreement on emigrating out
of Iran, but throughout the movie the pair show
all the traits of a married couple maneuvering
with each other in the course of what appears as
(most likely) a temporary rupture. 
