Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami made a short film in 1975 called Two Solutions for One Problem, about a schoolroom scuffle between two young boys. Through matter-the-fact narration, the filmmaker walks us through two possible resolutions of a relatively simple conflict: a boy borrows another boy?s book, but when he returns it, a page is ripped. In one scenario, the second boy responds to receiving his torn book by ruining one of the other boy?s possessions. This kicks off a cycle of escalating, eye-for-an-eye justice that resolves itself in violence. In the second scenario, the boys simply repair the torn book and return to the schoolyard as friends.
Kiarostami?s film, a deceivingly simple little movie that strikes at something close to the heart of personal and political conflict, dissects a moral conflict in a way that reduces the complexity of violent aggression to the simplified and satisfying scale of a schoolroom lesson. I was reminded of Kiarostami?s short while watching the new feature film by another Iranian director, Asghar Farhadi, A Separation. Like Kiarostami?s Two Solutions for One Problem, Farhadi?s A Separation is similarly concerned with violence, restitution, reprisal justice, and moral law. But rather than reducing morality to its fundamental parts, Farhadi?s movie restrains our perspective, weaving its moral vision through a complex tangle of personalities and interests. As a result, A Separation is an exasperating movie: spiraling, out-of-control, nauseating, and impossible.
The first of a number of ?separations? ? the rifts or rips ? concerns Nader (Peyman Maadi) and his wife Simin (Leila Hatami). We meet the couple as they sit before a judge, arguing their case for divorce. Shot from the point of view of the judge (whose face we never see) Farhadi is clearly placing the audience in the position that we nearly always find ourselves, albeit less overtly, in any film: at a judicial proximity to the matter at hand, forced to work through the rights and wrongs with limited intimacy and knowledge.
Simin wants to leave Iran, and she has obtained the necessary visas, however, Nader refuses to go. Nader?s father, who has Alzheimer?s, lives with the couple, and Nader won?t abandon him. Furthermore, the couple?s daughter, the 11-year-old Termeh (Sarina Farhadi) is forced to choose between mother and father, and for the time being, she stays home with Nader. Farhadi doesn?t give Simin much time to explain her reasons for wanting to fleeIran, instead, he immediate whisks us into their apartment, the director allowing his camera to invade the intimacy of the bathroom as Nader washes his elderly father.
This divorce scenario sets up the first of a series of slyly conceived relational dualities. Initially, A Separation swirls around this juxtaposition between political grievance and familial responsibility. But other complexities are introduced when Nader, forced to hire home help, invites Razieh (Sareh Byat) into his home. Razieh is poor, devoutly Muslim, pregnant, the mother of a young girl, and wife to a debt-ridden husband, Hodjat (Shahad Hosseini). There is something both pitiful and resilient about the woman, whose day-to-day navigation of her various roles and duties includes calling an Islamic hotline to ask if it is religiously licit to change Nader?s father?s pants after the old man wets himself.
We can?t anticipate the turn A Separation takes, in part because it is such a slight, almost forgettable action that eventually propels the film into an intense standoff between Nader and Razieh and Hodjat, catching Simin and the daughters in the middle. And while much of A Separation is boiled in the juices rendered by the sharp social, economic, and religious contrast between the two couples, it is a film equally concerned with those simpler, more fundamental moral issues that are on the one hand universal, yet also muddled by an individual?s state in life. It is reminiscent of the films of Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, and in particular his The Decalogue, which, like A Separation, takes the abstracted articulations of moral law and re-embeds the concepts in the elusive and murky human behaviors and experiences which they try to address and govern.
A Separation is a movie filed with grand accusations and little lies, brilliantly acted, and thick with emotional resonance. Fundamentally, it is an exploration of morality, but one that is so tenderly realized that its conceptual concerns are entirely submerged in a lingering and sustaining experience. It is, quite simply, one of the best films on 2011.
ufc on fox 2 supercross christina aguilera etta james funeral sundance film festival victoria azarenka the flintstones etta james
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.