Considered to be Iran’s best hope ever for its first Oscar, the film chronicles the lives of Nader (Peyman Moaadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami), a middle class Tehran couple, and their legal and familial struggles. The film has already earned a plethora of accolades, including two Oscar nominations for best foreign-language film and best original screenplay.
The film is culturally specific to Iran, but the moral quandaries and personal struggles of the couple and their daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, the director’s daughter) are universally relatable.
John Anderson, the critic for Newsday on Long Island, writes: “’A Separation’ is remarkable in its construction, a kind of Joycean synthesis of life compressed into the story of a single family, with whom their fellow humans will sympathize, regardless of nationality, ethnicity or political persuasion.”
Simin is keen on going abroad with her pre-teen daughter in order to take her away from “these circumstances.” She files for divorce from Nader, who doesn’t want to leave Iran because his father – suffering from Alzheimer’s – needs his care.
Left with no choice, Nader hires a nurse, Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a devout working class woman who takes on the job without telling her conservative husband, Hojjat (Shahab Hosseini). Razieh keeps a number of other secrets from her husband, including her pregnancy. A slight altercation between Nader and Razieh one day results in a lengthy court battle, pitching Nader’s liberal middle-class family against Hojjat’s conservative, working class clan.
But the film is more than just an exploration of class differences – it’s a film about difficult moral questions.
According to J. R. Jones of the Chicago Reader, “This is primarily a human story about a marriage unraveling, the husband torn between love for his daughter and devotion to his father, the daughter torn between one parent and the other.”
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said: “The intriguing thing about this script is that it gets us deeply involved, yet never tells us who it thinks is right or wrong.
Steven Rea of the Philadelphia Inquirer commented: “Farhadi shoots his actors – every one of them believable, and believably flawed – as they move trough partitioned rooms, gazing through windows, watching from mirrors. There are literal separations all through ‘A Separation’ – wells, stairways, streets, doors – that emphasize the isolation, the lack of understanding, the rifts in class and culture. That may suggest a film heavy with symbolism, but this is Iranian cinema: unhurried, deceptively simple, respectful of its characters, even as they lie to each other, and perhaps to themselves.”
Rea wrote, “The film involves its audience in an unusually direct way, because although we can see the logic of everyone’s position, our emotions often disagree.”
