"A Separation" Review (and my plea to you on behalf of foreign films)

It’s no secret that Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation” is the clear-cut favorite to run away with next week’s Academy Award for best foreign picture.  What’s not being said is that it may be the best film of 2011, regardless of its nationality. 

The title refers literally to the separation of Nader (Peyman Maadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami), a middle possibly upper middle-class married couple living in present-day Iran.  Simin desperately wants to move out of the country so that their daughter, eleven-year-old Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), may enjoy more opportunities for success.  Nader values his daughter’s future equally as much but refuses to leave behind his sick father who is suffering from Alzheimer’s.  Ultimately Simin moves out to stay with her mother in protest.

Nader is forced to hire a caretaker to look after his father while he is away at work and Termeh is at school.  Enter Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a mother of a four-year-old daughter herself.  Her husband is currently unemployed, so she discreetly takes the job despite the long commute in order to help with some of the finances.  (Because they are devout Muslims, her husband would never allow her to take a job in another man’s home without the wife of that man being present.) Oh, by the way, Razieh is four months pregnant with her second child.

   

The job proves to be incredibly stressful for Razieh who once even manages to lose the father while attending to a mess her little girl made on the steps outside the apartment door.  She later finds him down the street wondering aimlessly.  This leads Razieh to go so far as to tie the man to the bed one day when circumstances arise, circumstances she can neither help nor ignore, that force her to leave the apartment.  She returns to find a highly pissed son.  An argument ensues, push literally comes to shove, and from there, the lives of every single character I’ve mentioned seem to spin more and more out of control with each passing scene.  

There’s a small dispute to be resolved here (okay that’s severely understated), and we are not privy to all the facts.  This is where the “A Separation” becomes great and distinguishes itself from other films.  Because what follows is not a whodunit filled with the trite unfolding of events and plot reveals, but a fly-on-the-wall view of ordinary people forced into extraordinary circumstances and how they react. 

The film takes no sides, forcing us to just sit still and watch, unbiased.  One moment we question, or even become angered by the motives or actions or words of a character.  Then we sympathize with them the next.  I can only imagine how difficult that can be in today’s world of movie-making, to avoid the prototypical moustache-twirling villain and the knight in shining armor.  Farhadi makes it look effortless here.  And a big reason he’s able to do so should be credited to a cast with absolutely no weak links.  None.

The result is a complicated moral film that doesn’t ask for your participation, doesn’t ask for you to judge or witness.  It begs of you, nearly forces you, to exercise your understanding and own personal examination to limits you seldom explore in your own world. 

This is the power of foreign films.  They throw you into a world that is so alien to you; immerse you in languages and actions and idiosyncrasies that you would have otherwise maybe never been exposed to.  And then that beautiful moment occurs when you connect; you find something so familiar in such a foreign place: The revelation that your life relates to these people and places that once seemed so distant.  And you take a moment to consider the vast, immeasurable distance that your understanding just transcended, that this movie just transcended.  That.  That is the power of foreign films.