A year ago I participated in an acting workshop which focused on interpreting difficult scenes employing facets of laughter, crying and argument. I struggled with the latter. In order to accurately portray a hostile engagement on stage or screen it must be approached cautiously, lest it devolve into nothing more than a screaming match. The 2011 Best Foreign Language Oscar-winner from Iran, "A Separation", takes the basic idea of the great feud, a divorce, and spins it into a prickly, arresting drama which explores a huge range of argument to terrific effect.
Following a striking opening scene in a courtroom where husband and wife Nader and Simin unsuccessfully fight for a divorce, we are brought into their contemporary Iranian household where Nader (Payman Maadi) is left to tend to his 12-year-old daughter, Termeh, and his aged father suffering from advanced Alzheimer's. Simin moves into her parents' home leaving Nader to find a housekeeper to tend to his father. Whom he chooses leads to drastic consequences which spiral out of control and throw the family into turmoil.
What struck me while watching Asghar Farhadi's family drama was the interplay between old and new. I have never been to Iran, but if the nation is portrayed accurately, and I have no reason to believe it was not, then the interplay between a traditional Muslim structure which governs in a more general sense is being threatened by the multicultural and globalized world which is constantly shrinking the space between us, ushering in new ideas and a more progressive world. This becomes key when Nader's new housekeeper, Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a deeply pious woman, through her neglect of her responsibilities, leads to a series of trials which puts both her family's life as well as Nader's at risk.
The issue is this: having to leave to see her gynecologist, Razieh leaves Nader's father alone in his house, tied to his bed. When Nader returns home early he finds his father collapsed on the floor and money missing from his room. In a fit of rage when Razieh returns to the apartment, Nader commits a violent indiscretion and pushes her out the front door, apparently leading the secretly pregnant woman to miscarry. Because the fetus was over four months along it is considered a living being and subsequently Nader is tried for murder.
A whole host of precarious questions arise. If Nader did not know of Razieh's pregnancy should he be punished for the crime he is accused of? Razieh, who is immediately portrayed as an untrustworthy and possibly dishonest person, embellishes information at least as far as the viewer has seen. Do we pity her loss? And further, was Nader's action justified given the circumstances of what she allowed happen to his father? These become much more difficult to answer when we realize that Nader might not be entirely truthful.
The script allows no real room for us to ponder the questions on our own, nor does it present us with all the information we need, keeping truths a secret and propelling us forward like a thriller from one argument to another. Events unfold and we are left fixed to the screen trying desperately to keep facts straight and make up our minds about the genuineness of the characters. The difficultly in deciding who is to blame is compounded firstly by the fact that it is a Muslim society and therefore very alien--their practices and the importance of pride and proper judgment are lost to us Westerners--and secondly because in the end there may not be an innocent party. By the time we realize this it is already too late, the characters have sunk themselves into their situation to a point where there is no real escape for them.
The characters we see are people who could be anyone; they could be the family next door. The divorce is merely a springboard from which we are shot through the insecurities, the lies, the mistakes that people make when they are frightened. They are identifiable and easy to hate or pity or love because they are human in the most basic sense. The five main actors play their roles with an openness and a believability that is rare and commendable. Particular attention needs to be paid to Farhadi's daughter, Sarina, who plays the sensitive, intelligent and very perceptive Termeh exquisitely. Her performance is not great for a young actress, it is just great.
I was reminded of a movie called "Doubt", which came out in 2008, because come the end of the movie the audience was left undecided about the innocence or guilt of Philip Seymour Hoffman's character, who is accused of sexually molesting an alter boy. In a similar way, there is really no determining where blame is to be placed here. In the end, all of the characters have blackened souls, darkened by a desire for self-preservation. The arguments we watch in their many complexities are filled with half-truths and ambiguities and cast judgment on the audience who would quickly seek to condemn based simply on first appearances.
This is a breathtaking movie which defies the laws of drama with an impressive attempt to give us no real protagonist. We may think there's one, but that fault is ultimately ours.
4/4
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