Neil Young's Film Lounge

for this week’s TRIBUNE: Asghar Farhadi’s ‘A SEPARATION’ [7/10]

IRANIAN drama A Separation made a little bit of history back in February when it became the first film from its nation – one of the world’s art-cinema powerhouses for the last couple of decades – to win the Golden Bear, top award at the Berlin Film Festival (a.k.a. Berlinale).

But that wasn’t all: this fifth feature by 39-year-old writer/director Asghar Farhadi (who’d nabbed Best Director at Berlin for 2009′s About Elly) was awarded the trophies for Best Actor and Best Actress, for the “male ensemble” and “female ensemble” respectively. This had film historians scrambling through their record-books for precedents at Berlin and the other major European festivals at Venice and Cannes, but it appears that A Separation‘s triple-whammy may well be a unique achievement.

And this year’s Berlin competition was far from a one-horse affair: indeed, Bela Tarr’s Turin Horse was hailed by many who saw it as a masterpiece (Tarr had to be content with the runner-up Grand Prix), while there were also admirers of Miranda July’s The Future, Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus and Alexander Mindadze’s Innocent Saturday, among others.

But the festival did take place with Iranian film-making very much in the headlines: acclaimed directors Jafar Panahi and Mohamed Rasoulof had, on a few weeks before, received punitive, restrictive sentences for having the temerity to pursue their profession with a degree of independent-minded audacity, and with the international cinema community rallying to their cause many tipped Farhadi’s picture for a major prize even before they’d seen a single frame of it.

But as soon as A Separation – then known under the English-language title as Nader and Simin, A Separation (the latter is reportedly retained on the UK release-prints) – screened, it achieved such widespread, near-universal approval that many reckoned that it would probably have won the Bear(s) even without the Panahi/Rasoulof factor. Indeed, just last week it beat 11 rivals, including Terrence Malick’s Cannes-crowned Tree of Life, to take top honours at the Sydney Film Festival down under.

This is an extremely well-crafted domestic drama with much wider social implications, flawlessly acted and directed with a deceptively subdued style that draws us in and keeps us gripped for the full two hours. As the title suggests, the starting point is the estrangement – and impending divorce – of Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami), a middle-class Tehran couple whose daughter Termeh (director’s own child Sarina Farhadi) is a couple of weeks short of her eleventh birthday.

But rather than taking the expected Kramer vs Kramer, histrionic scenes-from-the-end-of-a-marriage approach, Farhadi largely eschews domestic confrontations and instead presents a steadily unfolding drama which brings in several seemingly peripheral characters from other strata of society. Chief among these is Razieh (Sareh Bayat) – employed by Nader to look after his Alzheimer’s-suffering father – whose pregnancy is pivotal to the events that follow.

Audiences are advised to keep their attention tightly focussed during the seemingly quite innocuous early stretches, as tiny domestic details prove crucial to navigating the tricky moral terrain explored during the latter stages – indeed, a second viewing is as desirable here as with any Hollywood twist-reliant affair in the Sixth Sense mould.

At once specifically Iranian – issues of religious propriety and the position of women are crucial – and universal in its implications, A Separation deals with weighty subjects of guilt, sin and redemption in a disarmingly straightforward and stimulating fashion, and so has a very strong chance of “crossing over” to those who have previously reckoned Iranian art-cinema too worthily dour for their tastes.

Neil Young
21st June, 2011
(written for the 29th June edition of Tribune magazine)