A Separation

In A Separation's opening scene, Simin (Leila Hatami), talking to a judge, comments that her husband, Nader (Peyman Maadi), whom she is asking to divorce, "is a good, decent person." In the beginning minutes of the film I too thought Nader was a good, decent person, then I thought maybe he wasn't, maybe he was selfish, protective, maybe slyly corrupted, then I thought he was a good, decent person who sometimes did bad things, then I wondered what 'bad' means, and then I wondered what 'good, decent' means. The film's closing scene purposely frames the importance of these ideas in a moment of tangible consequence.

Truth and morality lose their abstractness, but not their complexity, when taking shape in the lives of Simin, Nader, Razieh (Sareh Bayat), and Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), and their collisions with each other. Writer/directer Asghar Farhadi (whose About Elly I also admired), with exhaustive and veracious detail, like in About Elly, explores and observes particular, pivotal choices in his characters' responses to tragedy. Seems like a double-feature of this with Margaret would make for an insanely dense and interesting round of after-movie chatter.

In one scene Nader explains to his daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi) that he was aware of Razieh's pregnancy but was not aware of her pregnancy in the moment he committed an action, and that he can't explain this truth to a judge of laws that are formed without considerations for the complexity of actual existence. In the eyes of the law, Nader either knew or did not know, but in reality Nader knew without acting on the knowledge, viz., his knowledge did not have a personal value during an instant. This scene seems to encompass the spectrum of perspectives that become entangled in A Separation - the perspectives of morality, truth, law, and human emotion.

There are multiple instances of events being reshaped by the person telling the story of the event. Sometimes it seems like a matter of semantics, or a matter of moral emphasis, for example whether or not Nader 'pushed' Razieh out the door, 'threw' her out, 'shoved' her, etc. The verb selected becomes tethered to guilt and possible legal accusations. It feels like if Nader can find the right word, or explain his side in a certain way, he can escape guilt and legal penalty. Nader seems sometimes confused about whether he wants to escape personal guilt or escape legal penalty, for example when he tells Termeh that he wants to explain how Razieh couldn't have fallen down the stairs the way she claimed she did, and says he wants to explain this so that she (Termeh) knows, as if to say the discussion is solely about a moral conscience that exists independent of the legal system, but the next scene is Nader making the same explanation for the police, exposing that the discussion is linked to the legal system. Other times Nader proposes the possibility of conscience objectivity, like in the scene discussed in the previous paragraph, but notice how the way he shapes the proposal seems unfair and cowardly. When Nader tells Termeh the truth about his knowledge of the pregnancy he also tells her that he'll tell the judge if she wants - if she wants to see her father go to jail for one to three years - if she thinks that's the right thing to do.

The events of A Separation feel believable and real because the script is well-written, the film is well-made, and the actors offer consistent, successful performances. Sareh Bayat has remarkable, expressive, revealing eyes; during the movie I had thoughts like "her eyes are literally the world, we live on the surface of Bayat's eyes." They fit so much emotion that when they tear up it feels understandable, how eyes with such heaviness could sometimes burst. The actors, all of them, seem to grasp the emotional depth of their characters, as offered under Farhadi's leadership, and the actors give performances that feel engaged with a reality beyond the screen. It seems like they are being people, not like they are being characters.

It excites me that someone like Farhadi is a filmmaker. Farhadi, Jafar Panahi, and Abbas Kiarostami make challenging films that should challenge American filmmakers to make better, more honest films. When I think about their films I feel astonished by the power and potential of films. When I think too about Romanian filmmakers Corneliu Porumboiu, Cristian Mungiu, and Cristi Puiu, UK filmmakers Steve McQueen, Lynne Ramsay, and Andrea Arnold, Chinese filmmakers Tsai Ming-liang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Jia Zhangke, French filmmakers Olivier Assayas, Arnaud Desplechin, and Catherine Breillat, when I think about filmmakers like this and the films they make I almost feel like I could explode, like my heart is like Bayat's eyes, overfull with limitless feeling.