A Separation

"What's wrong is wrong - no matter who says what"

A lot of people felt vindicated when A Separation took out the Best Foreign Language Film award at the Oscars this year. It's the sort of film that has a quiet, undeniable power that gets into your head and makes you think, it's a film that - against all the odds - actually comes from within Iran whilst also questioning said country's oppressive regime. I have to admit that I was quite surprised at this film and the country it portrays, I never realised Iran was so modernised or that it was open enough for such dialogues to take place. I think some of us in the West have this view of Iran (and most of the other Middle Eastern countries) as backward nations full of religious fanatics. I guess this is part of the beauty of international films, they blow apart our assumptions and can broaden our view of other cultures. I'm not saying that Iran doesn't have certain issues relating to fanatacism and theocracy, because it does (as evidenced by this film), but the society portrayed in A Separation (and the issues it deals with - such as the separated marriage of the title) is entirely accessible to an English-speaking audience in ways that they may not have expected.

We open with a POV shot from within a photocopier, an image that establishes Iran as a society of contrast where technology and theocracy now exist side by side. Nadar (Peyman Moaadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) are a progressive Iranian couple undergoing a divorce due to complicated reasons. Simin wants to leave Iran so that their 11-year old daughter can grow up with a better education and opportunities, whereas Nadar refuses to leave while he still has his elderly Alzheimer's-stricken father to care for. It's a house in collapse, and the couple try to be pragmatic about it despite the difficulties in their situation.

Anyway, the film becomes quite intense when Nadar hires a maid to look after his father while he goes to work. A series of events occur (some of which we see, some of which we don't), culminating in the maid's miscarriage. Her husband, an unemployed man with a short temper, blames Nadar and demands satisfaction under Sharia law. Meanwhile, Nadar demands equal satisfaction for the woman's mistreatment of his father - an event that happened at the same time as the miscarriage.

I'm struggling to write this review without sounding racist or culturally sheltered. I don't believe that everyone in the Middle East is an Islamic extremist... I think they're people just like people in any other part of the world. But having said that, I feel like this film was partially about playing with Western assumptions about Middle Eastern society. The split between Nadar and Simin is largely amicable, they both still love each other and Simin even tells the judge that her estranged husband is a good father. This isn't your stereotypical Muslim marriage; this is a modern family that seems to be even more progressive than a lot of families in the West - with both mother and father working, and both parents supportive of their bookish daughter's quest for education... Nadar even encourages his daughter's independence (as evidenced by the petrol station scene). Another assumption that I (shamefully) made was that the husband of the maid would be an abusive spouse. He's a hot-tempered man, and the expectation of the viewer may be that he beats his wife, but the film doesn't play into such assumptions. When he finally cracks the kind of violence involved isn't what we might expect.


This is a film that's clearly working around a government's censorship - it doesn't seem like that kind of a movie at first, it's more of a courtroom drama - a complicated morality play in relation to a changing society. It tries to get at the truth of things by showing a seemingly simple situation involving a handful of people and then revealing the complications underneath. I think the hidden subversiveness of A Separation is in the fact that this is a situation where Sharia law can't and doesn't apply. These are people who are trying to assign blame for the harsh realities of life - the maid and her husband blame the loss of her baby on Nadar, and Nadar blames his father's decline on the maid. In reality, neither is really at fault for these unfortunate turns of fate - and it's a fundamental truth that seems at odds with the totality of Sharia law.

Another subversive facet of the film is the way it looks at the role of women in this modernising society. Nadar and Simin's daugher is forced by the (unfair) letter of the law into a situation that she shouldn't have to face. A Separation is partially about her loss of intellectual innocence, an internal act of government-sanctioned violation that demonstrates the differing levels of independence within Iran's infracstructure. Nadar and Simin's household might be liberal-minded but it's largely at odds with the society around it, and there's a certain incompatability between their progressiveness and the way the law operates in their country. The integration of religion into this society is quite heavy (aside from the Vatican, Iran is the only country in the world governed by a religious body), but the issues that Nadar's family faces - divorce, both parents working, care for the infirm - are ones that we would associate with our 'free' Western society.

For a film that seems so low-key on the surface, there's a lot of complexity to the issues it deals with. Director Asghar Farhadi directs it with such confidence and even pacing that it's hard not to get sucked into the magnetic pull of its events. It just feels real and relevant and once the plot started unfolding I just had to see how it would end.

DIRECTOR: Asghar Farhadi
WRITER/SOURCE: Asghar Farhadi
KEY ACTORS: Leila Hatami, Peyman Moaadi, Shahab Hosseini, Sareh Bayat, Sarina Farhadi

RELATED TEXTS:
- Asghar Farhadi previously attracted critical acclaim with his films Fireworks Wednesday and About Elly.
- For a great American indie film about divorce see The Squid and the Whale.
- Other divorce/separation films: Kramer Vs. Kramer, American Beauty, Lantana, Revolutionary Road, Little Children and Blue Valentine.
- Leila Hatami came to international acclaim with her role in the 2002 film The Deserted Station.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - won Best Foreign Language Film. Also nominated for Best Original Screenplay.
BAFTAs - nominated for Best Non-English Language Film.
Golden Globes - won Best Foreign Language Film.
Independent Spirit Awards - won Best International Film.