A SEPARATION (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin) (2011)

Genre: Drama
Director: Asghar Farhadi
Cast: Peyman Moaadi, Leila Hatami, Sareh Bayat, Shahab Hosseini, Sarina Farhadi, Babak Karimi
RunTime: 2 hrs 3 mins
Released By:  Lighthouse Pictures & Cathay-Keris Films
Rating: PG
Official Website: www.memento-films.com

Opening Day: 8 March 2012

Synopsis: Nader (Peyman Moaadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) argue about living abroad. Simin prefers to live abroad to provide better opportunities for their only daughter, Termeh. However, Nader refuses to go because he thinks he must stay in Iran and take care of his father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi), who suffers from Alzheimers. However, Simin is determined to get a divorce and leave the country with her daughter.

Movie Review:

There is an honest truth deeply situated in the heart of “A Separation,” one of the best films this year. And in that truth reveals a cosmic sense of unity with its characters battling through an inexorably harsh predicament. Few films have this quality of drawing us in through simple and uncomplicated narratives yet devastate us with the notion of being unceasingly real and without design. But even through its layers of verisimilitude, it leaves us with questions and quandaries that are unflinchingly perplexing and fundamentally complex.

Winner of the Best Foreign Film at this year’s Oscars, its writer-director Asghar Farhadi arguably proffered the best acceptance speech of the night by plainly beseeching the intrinsic artlessness of people around the world, stripped of their externally wrought anxieties and sharing common values of family and peace. His film is, in its barest essence, about the extreme adversities of war -- a war with consequences of far greater impact to a family unit than one fought in the trenches under a hail of gunfire can ever be.

Farhadi directs this trenchant film with the greatest of empathies and with the utmost humanity. Even during the film’s most trying scenes, he takes the pulse of the room and tempers them with an even-handed idealism that exudes a keen judgement of not only the film’s characters but the world that they live in – a world that feels truly authentic and nuanced. His patient and balanced point of views yearn and search out for greater observations made possible by context. He approaches this as neo-realist but comes away an ardent realist.

In Farhadi’s previous film “Fireworks Wednesday” – a film of equal quality to this, it must be said – he traversed similar themes and environments, crucially demonstrating the country of Iran and its society. His greater purpose – taking into account the aforementioned acceptance speech – is to personify his countrymen as people with universally felt emotions and aspirations. The laws of which they live in might be relatively strident and the culture, markedly un-Western and different but the struggles remain the same. The film takes in grand themes of class, gender, religion, and all the intricacies that go with astutely dissecting them in a manner simmering with Ozuisms – there are no easy answers for difficult questions.

Consider the scenes with its central couple – Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) at the helm. Shot in a terrifically absorbing frenetic style, the film explores their relationship’s evolution with a tentative hold. A reasonably happy, middle-class family becomes torn apart by individual notions of happiness and duty to and as parents. Farhadi has cleverly structured his simple plot through fractured events that grow in significance with each enveloping revelation. For all its keen inquiries, it inevitably succeeds as a gruellingly anxious and suspenseful study of character and circumstance.

Movie Rating:

(Terrific filmmaking, hits the mark in the highest degree)

Review by Justin Deimen