It is hard for me to not view Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation through a prism it does not invite. As one of the few cultural objects to emerge from a society that appears so willingly closed off from the West, it would be easy to see it as an ambassador of sorts for Iranian culture. When an American such as I views a film from France or Italy one does so with the understanding that it was produced within a separate culture, but one that still retains many of the same principles and constructs as my traditionally Western upbringing. It is the same basic life, but through a different filter. When I view a film from Iran however, a country whose rebirth in 1979 seemed almost reliant on a break from and rejection of Western values, there is a sense of near anthropological curiosity which piques my interest in the film, especially if it is one which seeks to tell a more contemporary and domestic story. How does living in such a heavily structured theocracy affect the everyday lives of the Iranian people? Is there something intrinsically different about the way that they live or the stories that they tell? How are they different from the Western world? These are not questions that Asghar Farhadi seeks to tell in his film, and I find it unlikely that the Iranian government would allow a film along these lines to even be made, at least one that tells things honestly, but in the end these are the questions which I bring with me to Farhadi’s film, and they are questions which, despite a lack of trying, the film does an adequate, and at times effective job of answering.
What the film seems to reveal about life in Iran however, is the very ordinariness of it. There is not some overarching cultural and social theocratic apparatus that predetermines these characters’ lives, or if there is it is not present in the film. While one character calls a presumably government-sponsored help line to determine if bathing and changing the clothes of an elderly man is a sin, this appears to be driven more by her personal sense of religion than any conscriptions sent down from above. The film does not intend to criticize her religiosity, but her decisions in this respect are certainly positioned as her choice to make. There is not a uniform religion that all characters must follow, and the family at the film’s center is able to be positioned as a secular one without any manner of judgment being passed on that way of life. There is a diversity of characters in Farhadi’s film, and one can see that despite the pressures that undoubtedly come down from above on a regular basis, a person’s true character, the good and the bad, is the defining aspect of one’s self in contemporary Iran.
I was struck by how easily the basic narrative of the film could have been transported to a different locale and a different time. I could see its basic structure transposed to a Hollywood melodrama of the 1940’s or 50’s, with its themes and ramifications easily playing out on any number of global stages. The characters all inhabit a personal realm, not a political one. It would be relatively easy to judge the characters for their actions, with the many lies, half-truths, recriminations, and otherwise untoward behavior that they engage in, but the film is sure to never give the audience an easy way out, skillfully weaving in layers of motivation and guilt. As soon as one character’s version of the truth is vindicated, that vindication’s resting ground is revealed to be another lie. If a character confesses to some unsavory action, their motivation is revealed to be, if not pleasant, at least understandable. The central event at the center of the film’s court case relies on a motivation not entirely explained or understood, leaving the viewer to determine Nader’s (Peyman Maadi) thought process at the time of this crucial event. It is reminiscent of Dreiser in novels such as Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy where a safe closes or a boat tips over and the author plays coy as to how mentally culpable the main character actually was. Despite the deep personalization of the film, many events and actions remain a mystery, and while some are revealed by film’s end, others are left to the audience to solve.
It is this deep personalization which ultimately frees the film from any sort of politics that one might be tempted to bring to it. The audience becomes so enmeshed with the characters and their domestic dramas that a larger political backdrop remains at a distance. There are obviously social issues at play here. Simin (Leila Hatami) wants a better life for her daughter Razieh (Sareh Bayat), and class issues between the principal characters remain unsaid but palpable throughout much of the film’s conflict. However, these social issues are personalized in a way that one would not expect in an autocratic regime. The larger issues of Iran the nation are absent, instead replaced by the day to day issues of the Iranian people themselves.
In a way this ends up both telling us a lot, and telling us very little about the state of contemporary society within Iran. We are shown much to make us realize how we are all similar but not much in the most crucial ways that Iran and the West are different. While a film should not feel obligated to provide an ethnographic, cultural study of its subjects there is also something to be said for situating the particulars of a film’s events within a larger social apparatus. Is it even possible for a film produced under the current regime to accomplish this goal? Possibly not. But that is not the goal of A Separation. What Farhadi’s film tells us about Iranian society is how similar it is to a Western or an American one, and in a way that is simply a manifestation of the film’s own complex themes. People might do good things or bad things, but they are more than anything else motivated by their own personal humanity. Much as the world’s conflicts arise from nation states pushing for the same thing in a different way, the characters of A Separation come into conflict as the same basic motivations manifest themselves through a different action by each character. Often cynical, but sentimental at times as well, the film projects a view of people that can easily have echoes on a universal level. We are all more similar than we would like to realize and if one could only understand this, the power of conflict to divide us could begin to disappear.
Picture from: http://www.soundonsight.org/a-separation-a-rarity-that-succeeds-on-many-levels/
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