Write Angles
by Adam Nayman
by Adam Nayman
A Separation
Dir. Asghar Farhadi, Iran, Sony Pictures Classics
Dir. Asghar Farhadi, Iran, Sony Pictures Classics
“It’s a screenwriter’s film,”
said a friend of Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, a designation that is at
once accurate and dismissive, on the nose and besides the point. Yes, the film,
which won the Golden Bear in Berlin and received excellent reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival before its selection
at NYFF, is extremely well-written, but the idea that its writerly qualities
should preclude its recognition as vital cinema strikes me as pretty reductive.
The film is superbly written, but it's also smartly directed, insofar as
there’s a continuity between its writer-director’s ideas and the visual
language he uses to express them.
Take, for example, Farhadi’s
staging of the first scene, which simultaneously anticipates other key
sequences in the film while also standing alone, bracketed off from the rest of
the action. We get a two-shot of the film’s major characters, Naader (Peyman
Moaadi), a prosperous Tehranian bank teller in his mid-thirties, and his wife,
Simin (Leila Hatami), seated side by side against a white wall. This beginning
is an ending, of sorts: the couple is in front of a judge and trying to get a
divorce. During this static, uninterrupted shot, the pair speak, first in turn,
and then over one another, about the rationale for their separation to an
unseen arbiter.
Simin desires the divorce because
Naader will not give her permission to leave Iran, nor to take their
eleven-year-old daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), with her to have a better
future. His refusal to leave is bound up not in the consolidation of his
authority but rather his responsibilities to his Alzheimer’s-stricken father,
who has moved into the family’s apartment. It’s simultaneously clear that Simin
and Naader have mutual respect (“He is a good and decent man,” she says of her
husband) and that their positions on this matter are completely
intractable—stubborn pride masking the deep hurt of people who love one
another. The direct address of this opening puts us in the same position as
the magistrate, presenting us with two people and their respective lines of
reasoning, and begging our observation and observance, if not our outright
judgment. This is an apt overture for a film that is explicitly about how
slippery the onus of interpretation can be—especially when all parties involved
would seem to have a pretty good case.
The matter-of-fact way that
Farhadi lays out his main characters’ grievances—and the judge’s decision to
not grant them the divorce on the grounds that neither partner has abused or
betrayed the other—belies the complexity of the ensuing narrative, which quickly
sprouts outward to include a number of other key figures. Simin’s absence
strains her relationship with Termeh, who doesn’t want to leave her father and
grandfather, but also necessitates the hiring of a housekeeper to care for the latter, who
cannot be left alone during the day. She turns out to be a lower-class woman
named Razieh (Sareh Bayat), whose unfamiliarity does not deter Naader from
seeking and trying to institute a quick fix. In desperate need of money to
support her unemployed husband and daughter—and in the early stages of another
pregnancy—Razieh takes the job, though an early scene where she phones a
religious hotline to ask if she can have permission to change her elderly
charge’s underwear after he soils himself suggests issues beyond a lack of
qualifications.
There’s more plot in A
Separation—a lot more, in fact—and I’m not interested in synopsizing it.
I’ve provided this detailed set-up of the film’s early action to address the
suspicions of certain critics that its narrative complications, which begin after Razieh is caught having slipped away from
her job in the middle of the day, leaving the old man tied to the bed for
reasons that are either very easy or impossible to understand, are overly
contrived. This contention places A Separation in the crossfire between
conventional narrative cinema—a sloppy, nearly infinite and totally imperfect
category that will have to suffice for the moment—and the so-called “slow
cinema” that has informed many a film-cultural think-piece in the past few
years, films that are not, if I may generalize, “screenwriter’s films,” even if
they are often the work of writer-directors. Think Tsai Ming-liang. Think
Lisandro Alonso. And think Béla Tarr, whose valedictory The Turin Horse
was deemed in some corners to have been robbed of the Golden Bear by A
Separation.
For my money, The Turin Horse
is exactly as contrived as A Separation, which is to say, completely so:
both are works of fiction whose narrative worlds and characters have been set
into action by their creators (in Tarr’s case, he’s built upon the biography
and works of Friedrich Nietzsche). I do not come to bury The Turin Horse,
which is grave and beautiful in the usual Tarr-ian sense—the opening shot is
one of the most remarkable things I’ve seen on a movie screen in a long
while—but I find the differences between these totally un-comparable (if not
incomparable) films to be instructive. Tarr does Tarr, overlaying his thick,
depressive sensibility—and voluptuous camera style—on material that fits that
approach snugly. (Which makes it an improvement over his Georges Simenon
adaptation The Man from London, a fleet narrative the Hungarian
distended to intermittently stunning and mostly grueling effect).
With its beautifully textured
gray-scale cinematography and sustained camera movements, The Turin Horse
is hypnotic—maybe literally given its maker’s repetition-compulsion—but there’s
not much to think about. Or rather, the gigantic issues in play, of life and
death and the possible preference one should have for the latter to the former
in the face of howling, gale-force cosmic indifference, are no richer or more
legible after 144 minutes than they are after the first 15. The Turin Horse
is “slow cinema,” and perhaps great cinema of a kind, but—and this is an
observation, not a criticism—it’s so rigorously self-contained as to choke off
any response beyond the mute acknowledgement, and, depending on one’s taste,
admiration, of what it’s doing—and make no mistake, it’s doing it to you.
(Note: I did not feel this way about either Satantango or Werckmeister
Harmonies, possibly because Tarr was able to balance his existential angst
with a welcome and leavening strain of grotesque folk humor).
A Separation, on the other hand, is no more than spare and
functional in its aesthetics, although there’s something to be said for the
choices Farhadi makes even after his quietly bravura opening. Simin and
Naader’s home is a choice piece of location scouting that allows for plenty of
shooting through windows and around door-frames, and the issue of compromised
sight-lines even ties into the story, which I am bent on not spoiling. The
editing is generally unobtrusive, although at least one noticeably abrupt cut
offers a good example of a filmmaker purposefully spiking his rhythms to
provide a payoff later on: in a film where almost every important event occurs
on camera, in plain sight, it’s important to note when it seems as though
something is being elided. There are also a few plangent visual metaphors on
display, none more affecting than when Naader gives his dad a sponge bath in a
flooded bathroom, weeping over the graying, dried-out husk underneath his
hands. This image—of a man lovingly maintaining an oblivious, failing father
figure—is the provocative center of a film that slowly builds into a kind of
state-of-the-union look at contemporary Iran.
This subtle patriarchal critique
is balanced against Farhadi's treatment of his two major female characters,
both of whom defy their husbands with dire consequences. The contrast between
Simin and Razieh—one thoroughly modern with her dyed-red hair and yearning to
escape; the other timid and so tied to religious traditions that she lacks
agency and, depending on one’s interpretation of her behavior, sanity—would
seem to be obvious but for two things. Firstly, both actresses are so good that
they develop the roles beyond the stock types of rich housewife and
impoverished laborer; secondly, Farhadi is only establishing this social and
economic gulf so that he can provocatively collapse it.
The fact that A Separation
is interpretable either as a lament for a country stifled by patriarchy or a
cautionary tale about the destabilizing effects of female willfulness of course
means that it’s neither: it’s a very carefully written drama in which, to quote
The Rules of the Game, everyone has his (or her) reasons. The film keeps
giving us things to think about: not only the twisty, surface-level stuff of
the plot, but underlying questions that are both pointedly specific—like
whether the same Iranian legal system that would deny two consenting adults a
mutually wished-upon divorce is any clearer-eyed when it comes to looking at an
accidental crime—and completely universal, as in the examination of how parents
can impose, rather than impart, values upon their children—and also use them in
pitched personal battles.
These themes are inarguably
present in A Separation, which even the unimpressed would probably agree
is, at the very least, a work of substance. The charge might be that they’re
too cleanly delineated—if not by the standards of most American movies, perhaps
in relation to the shining lights of modernist Iranian cinema. Farhadi is a
youngish veteran filmmaker, and I’ve only seen one of his other features,
2009’s fine About Elly, concerning a group of middle-aged friends on a
seaside vacation. On the basis of these two films, however, I’m prepared to
make a couple of observations: 1) his style doesn’t owe much to the
duration-based innovations and reality-fiction blurring of Abbas Kiarostami or
Moshen Makmalbahf (themselves perhaps dissimilar artists); and 2) that’s okay.
Kiarostami’s track record is above reproach, and yet if I’ve always responded
more passionately to the work of Jafar Panahi, it may be because the latter has
found a way to intertwine social and medium-specific concerns until they’re one
and the same (as in the phenomenal This Is Not a Film); my guess is that
the Panahi who made The Circle, with all its nagging, powerful
contrivances, would like A Separation.
So: we have well-wrought
narrative architecture and a skillfully realist presentation. Not enough, it
seems, to put a director at the forefront of any national artistic vanguard.
The case, then, is for Farhadi as a smart, supple dramatist whose respect for
the viewer manifests not only in his choices to delay or even deny narrative
satisfaction (the film has a nicely executed, if perhaps slightly predictable
open ending that even provides a visual rhyme of the first scene) but also his
lack of guile when it comes to giving up narrative and emotional payoffs. A lot
of the movies I revere right now are big on withholding, and yet A
Separation offers up vividly self-divided characters caught up in a
relentless plot tinged with hints of social critique. If that indeed makes it
screenwriter’s film, let the record show that this is a compliment.
Like many films, Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation (2011) allows us to discuss numerous issues of the culture and society of a particular context, in this case of Iran. Like most good films, it also transcends the boundaries of cultural specificity, inviting its audiences to pause and reflect upon issues that are universal to people regardless of their context.