My notes on Yu Darvish, Zack Greinke, C.J. Wilson, and Brandon Belt are up, as is a short piece on Baltimore promoting Dylan Bundy. I also chatted on Wednesday.
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The Iranian film A Separation
The separation of the title refers to the dissolution of the marriage between Nader (Peyman Moaadi) and Simin (the beautiful Leila Hatami), a schism spawned by Simin’s desire to leave Iran permanently and raise their 11-year-old daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi) in another country, while Nader refuses to leave his ailing father, who suffers from Alzheimer’s and is rapidly fading. The film opens with Nader and Simin arguing in front of a judge who refuses to grant her petition for divorce, because Nader doesn’t consent and she lacks sufficient grounds. Simin moves out, so Nader hires a woman, Razieh (Sareh Bayat, frumped up to appear less attractive), from a lower economic stratum to take care of his father during the day. Razieh struggles with the job, leading to an accident that draws her, her volatile husband Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), Nader, and Simin into a legal battle that threatens to tear both of their families apart.
The power of writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s script, which was nominated for Best Original Screenplay but lost to something written in English, is in its simple, unsparing realism. At several points the film seems to move as if in real-time, with painfully rendered arguments between Nader and Simin, Nader and Razieh, Hodjat and pretty much everyone in sight, and eventually Termeh, who naturally finds herself caught between the warring sides. The drama is organic, growing inevitably about of a few small misunderstandings, many of which are never cleared up (as they might not be in real life), each of which adds exponentially to the misery of the people involved.
This degree of attention to the mundane aspects of the conflict allows Farhadi to populate the film with small, intense details that punctuate the pervasive despair of the central characters. Nader doesn’t want to leave his father, who doesn’t recognize his own son but asks several times for his daughter-in-law, and feels her absence more than he would Nader’s. Hodjat’s fury is driven by his own unemployment and lingering resentment over the injustice done to him by his former employers. Nader tries to comfort Razieh and Hodjat’s young daughter, Somayeh, played by a first-time actress, Kimia Hosseini, who probably should have won the Academy Award for Best Eyes. And the final plot point hinges on something so small and so brilliant that a simple request unravels the entire resolution, leading to a final scene that may just rip your heart out for good, assuming you still had it after the first 110 minutes.
Truth, or the futile search for it, lies at the heart of A Separation, as every crime or offense that takes place in the film leaves room for doubt about culpability or even whether a crime was committed, with unreliable witnesses and dubious motives shading nearly every character’s words and actions. With the truth thus obscured, Farhadi gives us terrific portrayals of human responses to this uncertainty – usually interpreting events to fit their predetermined notions. The five principal actors are all superb in roles that demand that they show a broad range of emotions and convince the viewers that there is real empathy underlying much of the suspicion and the senses of betrayal.
It’s a small miracle that Farhadi was even allowed to make a film that is far from subtle in its criticism of life under an autocratic government in Iran. The oppressed status of women is central to the plot, in Simin’s inability to unilaterally leave her husband, in her (never fully elucidated) reasons for wanting to raise Termeh somewhere else, and in Razieh’s difficulties in finding and holding a job. The absurdity of the justice system and the stark differences between economic classes – especially Hodjat’s fear that he will be and Razieh will be treated unfairly by the authorities – also play significant roles in the story, and the overall picture painted of Iranian society is quite unflattering.
A Separation blows away most of the other 2011 films I’ve seen; of the four Best Picture nominees I’ve seen, only The Descendants comes close, yet a head-to-head comparison makes the Clooney vehicle seem ham-handed and superficial. I don’t know if A Separation was the best movie to come out in 2011 – I still haven’t seen Shame, for example – but it is the best I’ve seen from that year by far, and the presence of subtitles shouldn’t deter anyone from watching such a precise, heart-wrenching work of art.
If you’ve seen A Separation already, check out Children Of Heaven
I disagreed with you about “The Descendants,” but I completely agree with your assessment of “A Separation.” An absolutely splendid film. I had it as my 3rd best of the year behind only “The Tree of Life” and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” Farhadi is a genius and I was thrilled that the Academy at least managed to give it the Foreign Language award, and wish Sony Pictures Classic had made more of an effort to push it for Best Picture and the other major awards.
Fellow Meadow-Partiers, here’s a couple of 2012 festival movies I enjoyed (great performances, made me think, made m feel). I screened both at the Toronto Int’l Film Festival a couple of weeks ago.
“Yellow”
Blurb: “A young substitute teacher escapes from her drudging everyday life by fantasizing bizarre parallel realities, in this wildly inventive and visually dazzling head-trip from director Nick Cassavetes.”
http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/tiff/2012/yellow
“Smashed”
Blurb: “Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Aaron Paul, Nick Offerman and Megan Mullaly star in this story about a perpetually soused first-grade teacher’s painful but ultimately triumphant struggle to sober up and remake her life.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead was very strong in the lead.
http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/tiff/2012/smashed
If you haven’t seen it already, “Take Shelter” is much better than “Shame.” “A Separation” is definitely the best 2011 film I’ve seen, though. A nod to the first comment: I have “Tinker Tailor” second.
If you haven’t already, you should also check out the work of Iranian director Jafar Panahi. My favourite is “Offside” about young women who desperately want to attend the World Cup qualifier match of the Iranian national soccer team despite gender rules that prohibit them from attending (and filmed during the actual World Cup qualifier).
I couldn’t get through “Take Shelter.” Too emotional, especially with my daughter around the age of the protagonist’s daughter.
I do not see any miracle in the fact that Farhadi made this film in Iran. I only see tact and subtlety on his part to present a complex situation in a maner that all sides would consider their side of the story being put forward favorably.
In the opening scene Nader gives his father’s need of care as just one reason for not wanting to leave Iran. He claims there are multitude of reasons for not leaving, about which Simin is well informed. Presumebly neither party wants to tell the magistrate (or the censors) about the other reasons!
Could the father be a symbol for the real reasons to stay in Iran? Farhadi may be meaning to construe the father to stand for Iran, and dementia to be the affliction brought upon the country by those who trample upon Iran’s ‘ancient and glorious culture’; whether from inside by the fundamentalists or from outside by the NATO through sanctions and threat of aggression. Nader wishes to stay behind to help defend the ‘Fatherland’ and safeguard the ‘glorious culture’ by facing all challenges from within and without, plus passing down to the next generation (Termeh) all the resilience required for its further development.
On the other hand, Simin being a modern, individualistic and cosmopolitan woman, would prefer (the peano scene) to take the easy way out: stay out of trouble, take her daughter with her to Canada and leave behind: her native country, the fundamentalists, the foreign aggressors and the patriotic defenders of the ‘glorious culture’ to fight it out. No wonder she is branded as a coward and escapist by Nader. This, in spite of the fact that she tries to keep her umbilical cord to tradition by picking and borrowing one of Nader’s CDs featuring classical Persian music.
Does this sound a plausible explaination? We have the hindsight of Farhadi’s acceptance speech at Oscar’s, which shows how closely he identified with Nader. When, in a later interview, he is asked if he considers leaving Iran to avoid possible difficulties? He retorts : ‘who would abondon home because his child has fallen ill?’ Thus he confirms Nader’s stand for not wanting to leave Iran.
Keith,
Highly recommend you watch Leila, an Iranian film from 1998 also starring the beautiful Leila Hatami. It is moving and powerful, with much less polish than A Separation but just as devastating, if not more so). Stumbled upon it at our local video store (we get a freebie from the “old movie” section with any new rental, which often leads me to pick an interesting foreign film I haven’t heard of). Hatami’s performance in particular was striking, and I could see Leila being thought of as a “prequel” of sorts to A Separation. While it doesn’t appear that Leila is very well known, I imagine it’s quality and A Separation’s international success will help to change that.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116851/