The Iranian film A Separation was one of the most widely acclaimed movies of the past year, but I went into it knowing very little other than that it was about a couple on the verge of divorce because the wife wants a better life (outside Iran) for their young daughter while the husband needs to look after his Alzheimer’s-afflicted father. Based on this perfunctory plot synopsis, I expected to see a nuanced story about people trying to balance their responsibilities, feelings and circumstances. And indeed, Asghar Farhadi’s film is all of this.
But it is also (and this I wasn’t expecting) something very much like a thriller, complete with tale-altering twists: a psychological detective story where revelations aren’t just frisson-generators but flow naturally from the characters’ personalities and situations. Emerging from the screening, I found myself in a variant of the excited conversations one usually has after watching a film from the mystery genre. ”Remember that line where she says...?” “What did that glance really mean?” “That exchange was so unobtrusive one barely registered it at the time.” “I need to see that scene again.”
Two levels of suspense — inseparable from each other — exist in A Separation, and both circle around the film’s central incident: a brief scuffle between the husband, Nader, and the lower-class woman, Razieh, whom he has employed to look after his father while he is away at work. There is the mode of the conventional “whodunit” — or “what happened” — and though it feels glib to discuss a slice-of-life drama in such terms, the film itself makes a nod to such suspense: in one scene, Nader retraces the altercation (which has got him into legal trouble) for the police.
But the other form of suspense — which persists through the film — is at the level of character, where layers are gradually peeled away and we see the full potential (for goodness, anger, deception, understanding) of all the protagonists: Nader and his wife Simin, their intelligent daughter Termeh, Razieh and her hot-headed husband Houjat.
After watching A Separation I read two or three reviews by Western critics and was interested to note that they discussed it mainly in terms of the broad cultural differences between Iran and the West (therefore clubbing all the film’s characters together), while glossing over the schism between the two sets of lifestyles depicted within the story: the relatively well-off, cosmopolitan life of Nader’s family as opposed to the penury of Razieh and Houjat. But this is another important kind of separation, based on privilege and education. It’s a separation between those who are still rigidly devout (to the extent of staking their souls on the Holy Book) and those who have moved away from (or adopted a more relaxed attitude to) religion. And this separation has a distinct bearing on the plot arc, on the characters’ actions and their attitudes to one another.
Thus, the tension of the class divide comes through in little throwaway exchanges. “You think all we do is beat our wives all day!” Houjat shouts at Nader in the judge’s chambers. In another context, he exclaims “These people don’t even believe in God”, to which Nader retorts sarcastically, “Yes, God is only for you people.” At one point the conservative Razieh has to take religious advice about whether she is allowed to change the old man’s trousers when he has soiled himself. And Nader tells the judge that he couldn’t make out Razieh was pregnant because “she is wearing a chador all the time”. Over the course of the story, these many separations grow and collide into each other; little secrets, cultural assumptions and misunderstandings accumulate to create a snowball effect; much is revealed about individual character and, by extension, about the workings of a society.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer
