Vladimir Rakhmanin reviews the Iranian drama that has taken the world by storm…
Vladimir Rakhmanin
Staff Writer
The first time I had heard of A Separation, it was being unanimously praised. It was on the top ten lists of a lot of respectable critics, it had won the Golden Bear (the award for Best Film at the Berlin International Film Festival), and, at the time, it had a 100% rating on RottenTomatoes.com; it seems that the entire world fell in love with the Iranian drama, which film critic Roger Ebert called “[an] enduring masterpiece that [will be] watched decades from now”.
My first reaction was scepticism – the danger with foreign language films is that occasionally Western reviewers become fascinated with insight into a different culture and forget to look at the actual skill involved in the creation of the film.
As soon as the film began to roll, however, my scepticism immediately disappeared.
The opening scene of the film is an instant classic – a continuous, unbroken shot from the point of view of a judge, which lasts about five minutes. The judge is hearing a divorce case from a married couple, Nader and Simin. Nader’s father has Alzheimer’s, and so cannot carry out Simin’s wish of leaving Iran with their daughter to America. Simin files for divorce, wishing to give her daughter a brighter future.
Both parties attempt to make their case to the judge at the same time, resulting in a cacophony of conflicting, yet reasonable and well thought out arguments. It is almost inappropriate to watch the film with subtitles, due to the pace with which Nader and Simin interrupt each other, but even without the knowledge of Farsi, we can see from the desperate faces a desire to be heard, for justice to be carried out.
By putting us in the seat of the judge, Asghar Farhadi (director, producer and writer), sets up a tone of moral ambiguity that resonates throughout the film. Both characters are very easy to sympathise with, and both have clear reasons for why they to act the way they do – it is impossible to say who is right and who is wrong. This is true for the rest of the key characters in the film, including a maid who attempts to live her life according to the strict rules of Islam, and her daughter, who is still young enough not to take responsibility for some of her harmful actions.
When Simin leaves, Nader hires the aforementioned maid to take care of his father; what happens next is an event that cannot be mentioned due to the risk of spoiling the film. This event sets off a devastating chain reaction that is the source of serious drama for all of the major characters.
The main merit of the film is the way that it shows terrible events that seem to be no-one’s fault. You can’t blame any of the characters, or blame the socio-economic climate of Iran. The neutral, non-judgemental tone of the film (almost as if we are being told the events in a courtroom) shows us how there are no straightforward solutions in complex situations.
Certain parts of the film evoke parts of Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant Rashomon. An important event is reconstructed several times by Nader, who desperately tries to discover the truth by looking at it from several different angles. The result is absolutely compelling, and it is this “courtroom drama” aspect that makes the two hours pass by extremely quickly.
Now that we’ve covered the good points, it’s time to look at the relatively few bad ones. My main problem with the film was the camera work. I appreciate that the film was on a very tight budget, and that there was very little support for it in its home country, but I just can’t stand it when a film is shot using only handheld cameras. The resulting shaky image doesn’t make the film look “indie” – it makes it look sloppy and unprofessional. That is just my opinion, however; clearly there is a market for films that use handheld cameras – the surprising success of the recent Chronicle at the box office shows just that.
Camerawork aside, this is a very complex drama with a brilliant script, that not only shows us an insight into modern-day Iran, but also into the human condition. Will it be watched decades from now? Only time will tell.
