It’s been a while since I’ve seen an Iranian film, though
I am always eager to see them. Most in recent years have shown the
influence of Abbas Kiarostami (A
Taste of Cherry), who has a highly visual
style with long, slow takes and spare dialogue. Asghar Farhadi’s
A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin) is a very
different bowl of cherries. Tautly plotted and full of passionate
speech, it engages the mind more than the eye and poses a moral
dilemma, or a series of interlocking moral dilemmas, unsparingly
but subtly limned, rather than the stark existential crisis of a
Kiarostami film. And although the picture is very firmly set in the
social, political, and religious context of contemporary Tehran,
its morality has a poignantly universal relevance. Too many
reviewers and interviewers focus on Mr. Farhadi’s sometimes
troubled relationship with the Iranian government, as if there
could be nothing out of Iran of any interest that did not directly
challenge its clerical authorities. But to my mind one of the best
things about this film is that it makes all such political
questions seem trivial and irrelevant.
The separation of the title is between Nader (Peyman
Moadi) and his wife, Simin (Leila Hatami), who desperately wants to
leave the country. Somehow — how is never made clear — she has
obtained permission to go, but Nader refuses to accompany her as he
has to care for his senile father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi), a job
which seemingly has fallen to her lot hitherto. “He doesn’t even
know you’re his son,” insists Simin before the magistrate whom she
is petitioning for a divorce.
“But I know he is my father,” replies Nader.
The magistrate tells them that they are wasting his time.
Theirs is a small problem, he says — and it is, too, in the sense
that it is really quite simple. If she wants to go, she should go;
if he needs to stay, he must stay. Neither can impose his or her
will on the other. But we soon discover that there is a
complication. The couple’s 11-year-old daughter Termeh, played by
the director’s own daughter, Sarina Farhadi, insists on staying
with her father, and her mother will not leave the country without
her. In fact, it appears that it is largely for the daughter’s sake
that she wants to go in the first place, just as it is for the sake
of her parents’ marriage that Termeh wants to stay. So, instead,
Simin goes to stay with her mother (Shirin Yazdanbakhsh)
and Termeh fills in for her as she can in looking after the old
man, who needs almost constant attention.. For when she is in
school, however, Nader hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a poor religious
woman, to attend his father.
But Razieh keeps the job a secret from her husband, Hodjat
(Shahab Hosseini), a hot-tempered, unemployed cobbler who is
heavily in debt. Moreover, she has to travel from a long distance
away and must bring her own small daughter, Somayeh (Kimia
Hosseini), with her to work. The arrival of Razieh seems to
coincide with a further deterioration in the old man’s condition.
When he becomes incontinent, she must call the religious
authorities for a ruling on whether she is allowed to clean him up.
One day Nader comes home early to find no one in the apartment but
his father, who has been tied to the bed by one wrist and who has
subsequently fallen out of it. Without his oxygen, the old man
would soon have died. Nader also thinks some money is missing. When
Razieh returns, she cannot explain where she has been, though she
denies taking any money. He fires her and thrusts her roughly out
of the door. The next day she suffers a miscarriage.
The film’s big question seems to be: did Nader know when
he pushed Razieh out the door of his apartment that she was
pregnant. He insists he didn’t. She insists he did. If the court
decides he did, then he is guilty of manslaughter; if he didn’t,
then he is not guilty. Guilt will mean a prison term for Nader
and/or blood money to be paid to the family of Razieh — including
Hodjat, whose desperate need of money means that his (and Razieh’s)
incentive to lie is as great as Nader’s. Because key elements of
the story have been withheld from us, we are in the position of the
judge (Mohammad Ebrahimian) who has to decide who is lying. So, by
the way, is Termeh, whose attachment to her father and her hopes of
keeping her parents together seem to depend on her belief in his
truthfulness. But the consequences of the truth in both cases can
be so drastic that it is hard to work up very much moral
indignation against any of those who are driven to lie — as
everyone is by the time the missing parts of the puzzle are
supplied and we discover the truth for ourselves.
Or almost everyone is driven to lie. The
exception is Simin who is compensated, as it were, for having set
the whole train of events in motion in the first place by being the
only one left at the end with arguably clean hands in this
heart-wrenching wrangle over love and hate and guilt and money. As
a result, we are more than ever aware of the central enigma of
Simin’s wish to escape, which is the only thing in the movie that
remains — ironically, I think — morally unassailable. For
everyone else, we are left with something approximating to the pity
and terror that Aristotle said was appropriate to tragedy — which,
to the extent anything can be these days, this movie is. Above all,
it is like The Artist in being an example of the art of
movie story-telling, something that America pioneered in the great
days of Hollywood but which is now almost a lost art here. This is
a movie that will break your heart, and of how many movies in the
postmodern era can that be said? It is not to be missed.
