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.

PIFF Week One, Press Screenings (+/-).

The first film is Russia's Hipsters, Monday morning 11:00am. I eat a cinnamon bagel before I go. I don't know anything about the film, the experience is about encountering cinema with infinite trust. What I see is a 50s Moscow Soviet Union drama with scattered musical sequences. A group of psychocandy-colored dressed early-adults are cinematic post-Jarmusch/DiCillo rockabillies. The female lead is Oksana Akinshina of Lilya 4-Ever.

In the first sequence the audience laughs merrily, but the laughter doesn't continue in a united sense. Hipsters strides through its jokes too speedily and derivatively for them to grow in meaning, and its jubilance is exaggerated. It still manages to create infrequent shivers of joy within me. But a film that should be about the joy of discovery takes place in the machinery of convention. Being post-modern it's also hyper-aware and ironic about this (as one characters ultimately states, "The freer the person, the simpler the clothes"). The film unwinds itself in the final twenty minutes, beginning approx. with the birth of the African-American-Soviet-Union baby, and its final message is that you can't be hip for long. But fucking everybody can dance in the street.

I eat at Chipotle. At 2pm A Prophet starts. Jacques Audiard's perfectly crafted, badass, and crushing gangster film. "A better life, for me and my friends."

Blueberry waffles in the morning. Tuesday 11am, the Iranian About Elly. A film with a grueling twenty minute centerpiece. The cast is terrific, each playing their role with bravery and openness. "As lies and deception compound into catastrophe, About Elly focuses on the behavior and values of the Iranian middle class, illustrating how convention, conformity, and tradition can be restrictive, even among those who fool themselves into thinking they are not guided by them."



If you asked me to name my favorite of the week, and told me you'd abstain from kissing me if I didn't reply, I'd tell you my favorite was About Elly. This is a perfect poster for the film. This is how innocently it all begins. On vacation with friends and family, in a seaside villa, your children with you, someone goes missing. Someone is probably dead. And how do you explain to the police, to the person's family, and to yourself, how this has happened? The film examines the shades of guilt cast over the vacationers, and as small white lies build toward a state of total fabrication and confusion, each person goes through a series of confrontations with their own blame and guilt. As a viewer, I do as well.

I eat at Chipotle. It's raining and I don't have a jacket. Ajami is at 2pm. It's a non-linear slums story from Israel/Palestine. Its dimensions are revealed from different angles in dileniated chapters and culminate in a shocker ending.

Two green sauce burritos, from Trader Joe's, for breakfast. Wednesday 11am is Terribly Happy. A Danish Twin Peaks (lumber truck giveaway) by way of Hot Fuzz. It's best when it's funny, and sometimes it's hilarious. It also exhibits blends of tragedy and humor, terror and bliss, paranoia and provincialism. It bursts with a low-key creativity and I hope Henrik Ruben Genz builds in this direction.

I eat at the Persian House. 2pm is Fish Tank. Fish Tank is the first one I'd heard about prior. It won the Cannes Jury Prize. Andrea Arnold had done this previously with her debut Red Road. The protagonist is a teenage hiphop dancer who lives in Essex, England, in a monolithic apartment complex with her mother and younger sister. In a great early moment she head-butts another girl, then tries to free an old white horse tied up next to a trailer home. Arnold treasures her character (played by the real-deal Katie Jarvis), but never lies to us about her, and this means she never forces us to see her in a single way. The elasticity of her emotions enrich the film's shifting textures of bravery and fragility. Arnold's talent as a filmmaker engenders cohesion and broad-ranged poetic realism.

No breakfast. 11am, Art of the Steal. It stunned us all. A comprehensive documentary about an absolute instance of commodification of art. It's a brave wide-eyed film.

Lamb meatballs at the Persian House. 2pm Girl on the Train. The female lead character is great, but her journey is overstated, especially one day following the subtle tragedy of Fish Tank. In a key scene she leans on the shoulder of a young boy and explains away the whole film. Later, the boyfriend explains it again. The second half should have been titled "Explanations" and not "Consequences," essentially. Give Catherine Deneuve something to do!

11am this morning Mid-August Lunch, a delightful, short Italian comedy from screenwriter Gianni Di Gregorio, who crafts richly detailed moments and cleanly developed characters. The film left me with the sensations of a genuine visit. It also was the most consistently funny film of the week. Or as I told a friend, it's a smile of a film. That's what I told my friend, "It's a smile of a film," which means that I actually talk like this in person too. I should also mention that these audiences are basically me and a pack of the elderly. They loved it too.

A downtown restaurant, chicken parmigiana sandwich. 2pm today is Home. Another terrific surprise. The film journeys into madness by following a family of five whose house becomes highway adjacent property. It's not a straight trip though, and the film is always vacillating, and always exposing its characters in full dimensions. The level to bizarre detail is astonishing.