No separation

Where Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation chronicled the disintegration of a marriage, The Past, the Iranian writer-director’s follow-up, begins four years after the marriage of its central characters has ended. In the instantly transfixing opening sequence Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) and Marie (Bérénice Bejo) find each other on either side of an immense pane of glass, gesturing, mouthing words, neither of them audible to the other or to us. Ahmad has flown to Paris from Tehran to finalize the divorce. Marie comes to fetch Ahmad from the airport in a borrowed car—borrowed from whom she won’t say, though the dry cleaning dangling in the back is conspicuous. This soon-to-be ex-couple are pleasant with each other, all grievances presumably having lost their venom years ago. Indeed, the complicated yet completely coherent drama about to unfold is generated not from tensions between Ahmad and Marie but from within a larger circle of characters, all of whom, whether children or adults, present or absent, are somehow ensnared in the powerful force that gives the film its title. 

Marie drives Ahmad to her home—his former home—where he finds in her backyard two children, one being the youngest of Marie’s daughters from another relationship, the other being a little boy Ahmad has never met. During the first third or so of The Past Farhadi is careful not to rush exposition, focusing neither on explaining the past or foreshadowing the future, and instead living fully in the moment. He knows that everything to come will carry more weight after we’ve done some of our own detective work, spent time coming to know these characters in a more organic method. Marie’s home, for example, is cluttered and wears layers of varied inhabitants. Messes have meaning, as does the dynamic between she and that temperamental little boy. Let’s not get too precious about spoilers: that boy is the son of Marie’s new partner, Samir (A Prophet’s Tahar Rahim), who Marie wants to marry, thus the sudden urge to sign papers. Marie hasn’t informed Ahmad of the details of her current situation, though the reasons for her continual withholding grow only more complex as the story continues. Marie’s teenage daughter Lucie (Pauline Burlet) disapproves of her mother’s new relationship so vehemently that she refuses to come home. Is this simply a matter of Lucie’s unwillingness to allow an intruder into her already broken family? Is there something more at stake? 

I fear that if I overemphasize the immaculate structuring of The Past I’ll give the impression that it’s been dramaturged within an inch of its life—nothing could be farther from the truth. Farhadi simply excels at character and plot development to a degree that’s extremely rare in adult, intellectually sophisticated, emotionally resonant drama. Some of what’s revealed here is devastating, yet by the time such revelations arise we’ve beheld a boggling geometry of allegiances and have cause to feel such investment in every character that it becomes impossible to delineate who’s supposed to be villain, who hero. This is a moral tale in the most modern sense, by which I mean there’s no moral to be surmised, only recognized, worked through, considered. And while Farhadi’s style is relatively straightforward and chronological, utilizing hard cuts, no score and brilliant naturalistic performances, there is something about his approach to working through moral quandaries that, like the mysterious scenes that open and close The Past, recall the films of Kieślowski. Which is meant as a high compliment. 

            

Riddled by the facts

The credits float over the image of cylinders of light moving across flattened government-issued documents. The first scene proper unfolds over a single static shot taken in a small judicial chamber, where we learn of a petition for divorce between Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moaadi). Simin has been granted official permission to move abroad and is anxious to take advantage of it. Nader has decided against joining her, his stated reason being that he refuses to abandon his elderly father, who suffers from Alzheimer’s and lives with the couple, though we gather there may be other, more complicated reasons involving a sense of comfort, of home, an idea of Iran. Simin and Nader also have an 11-year-old daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), and both parents want custody. Simin and Nader speak directly to the camera when stating their case. Just as the credit sequence is shot from the point of view of a photocopier, this first scene is shot from the point of view of a judge. Which is to say, we’re the machine, we’re the judge, the apparatus. We’re the ostensibly neutral observer. But how neutral can we really be?

Writer/director Asghar Farhadi’s fifth feature, which was the first Iranian film to win the Golden Bear at Berlin, as well as the Golden Globe and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, does indeed feel like a landmark, encompassing many of the hallmarks of the great Iranian films of the last 20 years—viewers familiar with the work of Abbas Kiarostami or Moshen Makhmalbaf will recognize that particular way in which discussions develop over extended scenes through a busy mixture of legal, religious and ethical arguments, as well as the placement of great burdens on children—while possessing a gripping urgency and lack of authorial imposition that counteracts the potential alienation that may otherwise leave certain international audiences cold. A Separation is a film about process, and about how much of it occurs outside the controls of courtrooms. Nader hires a pregnant woman to look after his father—there’s a bizarre (at least to me) scene where the woman calls some sort of religious hotline to ask if it would be a sin to change the father’s soiled pants—but circumstances prompt the woman to do something stupid that endangers Nader’s father, and then Nader does something stupid in return, and that stupid thing causes the woman to lose her unborn child. Or does it? This is a film riddled by facts: the more we learn the more ambiguity festers. The two facts that are never in question are Simin’s determination to leave Iran and Nader’s to stay. Between them stands Termeh, who over the course of the film is forced to make a number of devastatingly difficult decisions. It’s her future more than anyone’s that’s at stake, and for all the diverse forms of support her parents bestow upon her, she’s given no help in choosing what to do.

As A Separation is set to (finally!) open in Edmonton, Farhadi himself has just been quoted as saying that he has no intention to leave Iran, that he loves his country despite its mounting difficulties. But it may not be so easy for him to keep working there. Apparently, following Kiarostami’s example, he’s to shoot his next film in Europe.