The BBC recently surveyed 177 international critics about their picks for the best films released since 2000. You can read the resulting list of 100 films here. Of course, no-one will ever entirely agree with cumulative lists like this, but it's a great place to start if you're interested in exploring the best of what modern movies have to offer. I will be reviewing the top 10 picks, and offer my opinion on what's great about them.
Directed by Asghar FarhadiA Separation received exceptional acclaim and success on its release in 2011. The critical response was unanimously great, and the movie earned nearly 8 million dollars in the United States - a tiny amount compared to the average Hollywood release, but a smash hit compared to the average Middle Eastern film, which rarely crack a million in box office earnings. It was nominated for Best Screenplay at the Academy Awards - an uncommon achievement for a film not written in English - and won for Best Foreign Language Film, a first for an Iranian movie.
Iran, 2011
Part of A Separation's enthusiastic reception was likely due to its novelty with many non-Iranians. In the United States, Iran is known mostly for its repressive government and politics, for nuclear fears and sexism. A Separation was an eye-opener for many. It's an intimate study of everyday people who live in a culture alien to most outside Iran's borders. A Separation was less novel to those who had been following Iranian filmmaking - a unique film culture that produced artists like Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who had been making films of startling poetry and clarity since the 1970s despite restrictive censorship from their government. It was even less surprising to those who had seen previous Asghar Farhadi films like Fireworks Wednesday or About Elly, noteworthy for their multi-layered characters and intricate stories.
However, no matter how fascinating it is as a rare honest glimpse into a foreign culture, the main appeal of A Separation is not educational - it's just a tremendously good movie, the work of a master storyteller. Before becoming a filmmaker, Asghar Farhadi studied theater. His theater experience shows in his carefully structured, dialogue-driven screenplays. Farhadi's genius as a screenwriter lies in how he reveals the motivations of his characters and shows how everyone has reasonable cause to believe what they do, even as their individual perspectives fall disastrously short of the whole truth.
A Separation begins with a simple but difficult ethical quandary. By the end, the varying truths and lies told have woven an enormous web of moral questions, which the characters have created and cannot escape. Nader and Simin want a divorce. She wants to leave the country to provide a better life for their young daughter, Termeh, and their visa expires soon. He needs to stay to care for his Alzheimer's-afflicted father. During the divorce, Simin leaves home to live with her mother. Due to her absence, Nader hires a young woman, Razieh, to become his father's caretaker while he's at work. One day Nader returns home to find Razieh gone, and his neglected father injured after a collapse. Razieh returns to a furious Nader, who also accuses her of stealing before violently shoving her out the front door. Nader later learns that Razieh ended up in the hospital, suffering a miscarriage soon after their argument. Razieh and her hotheaded husband, Hodjat, take Nader to court, accusing him of causing her miscarriage by his aggression - an accusation that, if proven, would equal a murder sentence.
If there's a running theme connecting the Iranian films I've seen, it's the quest for truth. What is truth? How do we determine it? Maybe this search for truth in Iranian film arises from the urgent importance placed on certain virtues in Islamic Middle Eastern cultures, such as righteousness, justice, and honor. Maybe it's a reaction to a government with a totalitarian claim on The Truth in all aspects of life: religious, social, individual. The best, most conscientious artists cross-examine the accepted mores of their societies, and Asghar Farhadi is particularly bold in that regard. A Separation is about the impossibility of determining a singular, objective truth. Everyone's version of the truth is formed by their own limited perspective, their self-interest, justifications, and misunderstandings.
Where do we find truth? Turning to official, society-mandated truth often provides no satisfying answers. A Separation's opening credits unfold over images of passports being scanned - the elements of an individual collated onto an official document, proof of a person's existence even as it flattens and dehumanizes them due to bureaucratic necessity. The government courts of A Separation - fascinatingly different from the legal system in America - apply rigid moral judgments, drawn from the Qur'an and Iranian law, to messy human lives that don't fit in such neat boxes of right and wrong.
But individual perspectives in A Separation are often no more truthful. The opening scene is the film in miniature. Nader and Simin tell their reasons for seeking divorce to a judge. The dissolution of their marriage has been caused by, ironically enough, devotion to family members. Simin wants a better, freer life for her daughter - when the judge huffily asks why she believes Iran would not provide a good future for Termeh, Simin's silence and confrontational stare speaks volumes. Nader wants to be a good son and not uproot his already-fragile father from his home, or place him in a hospital. Their decisions are motivated by good, right things, but have nevertheless brought them to an ugly, wrong place - a formerly loving couple, now divided and spiteful. Farhadi's staging of the scene is simple but brilliant - the couple sit facing the camera, putting the audience in the place of the judge. This immediately draws us, the viewers, into their dilemma, making us more than passive spectators but directly involving us as judges to their case.
I found my judgments, and sympathies, constantly shifting throughout the film. Nader's anger with Razieh was justified. She had neglected her job, putting his father in danger. We see the depths of love he has for his father when he returns home to find him sprawled on the floor, hardly breathing. Determining he is alive and not seriously injured, Nader cradles him in his arms, weeping with relief. His fury with Razieh is largely a way to vent his fear. But his violence is cruel and unjustified, and has unforeseen consequences.
Razieh's duplicity proves destructive to everyone around her. She lies to Hodjat about the nature of her job, since he would not approve of her working alone in a man's apartment. She does not tell the truth about why she left Nader's father alone. And she neglects to mention all the events leading up to her miscarriage, which would throw reasonable doubt onto Nader's complicity in the tragedy. But she also lives under enormous pressure from the impossible demands of her strict religiosity and oppressive husband - her circumstances force her to be duplicitous to survive. One small scene reveals much about Razieh. She calls some sort of religious hotline to get the Islam-approved answer to a problem: Nader's father has wet his pants and it is her duty to clean him - but he cannot undress himself, and it is a sin for her to be in the presence of an undressed man apart from her husband. She is caught between the threat of damnation and the necessities of life, and is not always honest in negotiating the two.
Similarly, her husband Hodjat's plight is sympathetic even as his behavior is despicable. He carries himself as a man who has been mistreated his whole life. He has lost his job and been jailed for failing to pay his creditors, resulting in a terrible bout of depression. He cannot find work and feels emasculated by his wife working to pay the bills behind his back. Hodjat has become hyper-religious and quick to anger to compensate for his failings. Once his wife loses her baby, he finds in Nader an easy scapegoat for all his problems. It is easy to characterize Nader - middle-class, educated, successful - as The Man, a symbol of all his oppressors. Similarly, it was easy for Nader to accuse Razieh of theft (wrongly, we learn) because he views her as lower-class and uneducated. The stark difference in their lives is illustrated by their apartments. Simin and Nader's home is well-furnished, marking them as comfortably middle-class, and filled with stacks of books, showing that they are educated. Razieh and Hodjat's apartment shows their poverty, with its barren walls and floors, and generations of their family living in a few small rooms. Considering the very different environments that have shaped them, when presented with the same sequence of events how could these people possibly arrive at the same conclusions?
Another characteristic that many Iranian films share is the prominent use of children as major characters. This is for a multitude of reasons - some of them subversive, as supposed children's films are less likely to be accused of anti-government / anti-Islamic content, so filmmakers can sneak social criticisms beneath censors' noses. Often it's for the sake of contrast, as the guileless, faithful perspective of children reveals the hypocrisy and cynicism of the adult world - and this is certainly true of A Separation. Termeh remains faithful to both her parents, watching them intently and trying to ascertain what is right. She is put in the impossible position of having to choose between them, and the terrible cost of divorce is written on her face.
A Separation is not always pleasant to watch, but I urge you to do so anyways. Farhadi's script deserves to be counted among the all-time great screenplays. It is full of perfectly-timed twists and revelations without ever feeling contrived, and creates the suspenseful urgency of a thriller not from the threat of violence but from moral dilemmas and the weight of characters' decisions. This is a movie of rare intelligence and integrity.
The BBC Top 10:
- Mulholland Drive
- In the Mood for Love (previously reviewed)
- There Will Be Blood
- Spirited Away
- Boyhood
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- The Tree of Life
- Yi Yi
- A Separation
- No Country for Old Men
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