Sweet Smell of Success - Film Review: A Separation

January 26, 2012

Dir. Asghar Farhadi
Score: 8.3

The sound of the heavy glass door closing shut in the main characters’ Tehran apartment is final and thunderous, like an echoing clap of permanence every time someone leaves. Ironic, then, that no matter how many times characters leave the apartment, angry, insulted, or thrown out with conviction, they don’t stay gone long.

The film begins with a POV camera staring at an attractive middle-set couple. Simin (Leila Hatami) is petitioning for divorce from her husband, Nader (Peyman Moadi) not because he’s cruel or unfaithful to her, but because he refuses to take advantage of the visa they have obtained to leave the country with his wife and 11-year-old daughter. As with nearly every element of this brilliantly complex and compelling film from Asghar Farhadi, his explanation for not wanting to leave is absolutely as valid as his wife’s is for wanting to leave and make a better life for their daughter. Nader’s father is old and infirm with Alzheimer’s, you see, which makes it impossible for him to leave without feeling as if he’s betraying his family.

Instead, the couple comes around to a kind of compromise: She will leave and live with her parents for a while, and he will hire someone to watch after his father while he’s at work. Hastily, he hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a woman faintly known to his wife, but quickly the job proves overwhelming to her, partly because of her devotion to Islam (in one telling scene, she feels she has to call a religious figure to ask about whether or not she can clean Nader’s soiled father without causing sin) and partly because she is five months pregnant when she takes the job. Things get increasingly complicated when she has to leave suddenly for a doctor’s appointment one afternoon, leaving Nader’s father locked in his room and tied to his bed. When Nader comes home early and finds his father, he snaps, and becomes even more agitated when he thinks she also stole money from his office. Incensed, he throws her out of his apartment, and the resulting tragedy powers the film through its tumultuous final act.

Like Yimou Zhang (whose 1994 film To Live strikes similarly poignant and resonant chords), Farhadi is nothing if not a careful observer of human behavior. His meticulous screenplay also works extremely hard to give everyone a fair shake. There are never any easy answers in the film, never a point you can safely point the finger and assign blame for the entangled mess the characters work themselves into. At the beginning, we assume the “separation” of the title refers to the married couple and their differences, but, in fact, it’s far more microcosmic: We all lead our lives separate from everyone else, connected by blood, or proximity or tragedy, but never, ever truly sharing space with anyone else in our lives.