The metaphor doesn't get any clearer than this. As battling spouses shout at an invisible judge sitting where the camera is, the message is undeniable: they're not just fighting over a relationship, but over a country, one that has both abandoned and entrapped them. The wife doesn't want to stay with her husband, but it's more their circumstances that she's fighting to escape from with their daughter. Not that she, or Ashgar Farhadi's film, comes out and says this. When the unseen judge asks if she thinks their daughter has a future in Iran, she ducks her head and doesn't respond. Writer-director Farhadi's subtle but explosive domestic crime story, dancing nimbly around censorship rules, makes a ringing statement as clear as the injustice witnessed in each of the main characters' eyes.
After failing to get a divorce from her husband Nader (Peyman Moadi), Simin (Leila Hatami, regal in her confused pain) makes a quick exit from their apartment. He has refused to leave the country with her, saying that he couldn't leave behind his Alzheimer's-ridden father, and doesn't comprehend how she could even think of doing such a thing. She leaves behind their young daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), who is seemingly on Nader's side but is really just playing a game of trying to keep them together. Nader doesn't seem much for reflection, and is already interviewing a maid, Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), to help out with his father while he's at work.
Disaster appears certain, with Hodjat - who brings her daughter along to work - fuzzily prevaricating about whether she can make it on time, whether the pay is enough, whether she can even handle the workload. But Nader shrugs it off and lets things fall apart. Once he's out of the apartment, the reality of her surroundings catches up quick with the unassuming Hodjat. Soon she's on the phone to a religious help line, asking if it's a sin for her to help clean a man who soiled himself. From that point on, the class lines become more starkly drawn, with the Western art seeming more noticeable in Nader and Simin's tastefully expensive apartment. Simin's simple head scarf, stylish clothes, and sense of self-determination contrast dramatically with Hodjat's heavy black chador, obvious poverty, and unemployed husband who doesn't think it's right for her to be working. There's a misunderstanding, a fight, and then both couples are drawn into an escalating swirl of judges and punitive threats.A Separation is a film in which quicksand pockets of emotional entrapment are alternated with a precisely monitored kind of low-key crime story. While crisply framed and brightly shot in that clear Tehran sunshine, it has a quality that feels increasingly claustrophobic the more clear it becomes how limited each character's options are. Farhadi is a brilliantly intuitive filmmaker, one capable of coaxing effervescant if everyday images from the camera (nothing but streets, courts, and apartments on view here, yet it sings) and just as sublime naturalistic performances from his actors. He clearly limns the societal levels that are clashing here -- an educated man snapping at a worker, "God is for your type only" -- in a way that is minimal yet stretches through the entire film like a skeleton. Religion is like a weight here; it hauls everything down.
Perhaps it's too much to call A Separation a crime film, even though murder charges and prison time hang in the air, but neither is it merely a kitchen-sink drama. This is grand metaphorical fiction that unpacks a weighty and involving story even if one ignores the political implications of it all entirely. But in that metaphor lies the greatest drama of all. Husband and wife, maid and employer, mother and daughter, they may seem to be fighting each other, but it's the state that wins.
aka Jodaeiye Nader az Shim
