A Separation

From the opening minutes of A Separation we are thrown into the deep end of the film’s emotionally bruising and complicated morass. The simplest of domestic squabbles can so easily spin out into messy situations that grow exponentially and drag in surrounding players. What starts as a simple impasse between a married couple soon involves a lower-class family and a thorny legal battle.

But how do we get there? That’s the pleasure and engaging emotional tournament that A Separation pulls us through. It is a masterpiece of taking the old adage of the “frog in the slowly boiling pot” and applies it to the narrative and character journeys.

Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moaadi) are a married couple at a roadblock in their relationship. She wants to move out of Iran and raise their daughter elsewhere, it is never specified where, and Nader wants to stay to take care of Alzheimer’s-afflicted father. You understand exactly where both of these people are coming from and feel your sympathies being pulled in both directions.

There is, of course, a separation as Simin moves out of the family apartment and Nader does not interfere or stop her. There’s a glimpse here that he respects her autonomy as a person, but refuses to allow her to take their daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). We sense the immense love and history between these people as this fracturing of the household occurs, but this is all nearly a prelude for what is to come.

One of the joys of watching A Separation is discovering where this basic premise takes us and revealing it in gory details would be a disservice. Just know that Nader hires a devoutly religious woman (Sareh Bayat) to care for his father in Simin’s absence, and this proves a complicating factor for a variety of reasons. The personal becomes uncomfortably political as class, sex, and religion comingle and ignite.   

Asghar Farhadi writes and directs a tense, absorbing drama that leaves us with ethical and moral questions that don’t have easy answers, if they can have any answer at all. Our empathies are evenly spread across the disparate POVs and characters demanding attention/their voice, and Farhadi glimpses them in often extreme closeup to register the immediacy of their situations. Farhadi’s milieu is a tender humanism that makes his fundamental structure so complicated and conflicted. Truly, A Separation is one of the richest films of the 2010s.