Asghar Farhadi’s family drama is gripping, upsetting and unusually fair to people behaving badly. A few plot complications look carefully placed, but we recommend it without hesitation for the actors and the uncomfortable attention paid to the children.
Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation makes a family dispute gripping enough to hold us through every change of mind. We would recommend it to almost anyone, including people who think they have had enough arguments at home. A separating couple, a child between them and a legal struggle give the writer-director plenty to untangle, but he keeps returning to the difficulty of getting another person to listen. Each explanation makes sense for long enough that we begin to accept it, then someone else gets a turn.
Payman Maadi’s Nader and Leila Hatami’s Simin are persuasive enough to frustrate any hope of choosing a side and staying there. Maadi makes Nader’s certainty uncomfortable: we understand how a person can be convinced of his own decency and still be difficult to live with. Hatami gives Simin equal force, and the marriage feels substantial enough for its unravelling to matter. Sareh Bayat’s Razieh and Shahab Hosseini’s Hojjat are just as carefully played, with differences of class and religion informing the quarrels without explaining away anyone’s behaviour.
Mahmoud Kalari’s mobile camera makes us attend to the people around a speaker as well as the person speaking. The agitation suits the arguments, but the staging remains clear enough that we can keep looking for a response. Glass partitions in Keyvan Moghaddam’s production design allow Farhadi to keep people in sight even when they are physically divided. It is an effective use of an ordinary domestic feature, and it avoids making the home feel like a diagram of the family’s problems.
Hayedeh Safiyari’s editing keeps the dense plotting legible, an unglamorous achievement on which much of the suspense depends. We do occasionally notice how precisely Farhadi has arranged the complications; another difficult question can arrive just when the screenplay needs one. Those moments briefly make the people seem more obedient to the story than they should, though the actors soon recover the sense of ordinary, stubborn behaviour. Sattar Oraki’s music is restrained enough that we never feel instructed to forgive anyone, which is the right judgement for this film.
Sarina Farhadi’s quiet, watchful Termeh is the performance that stayed with us. We were upset by her attention to the adults, because their need to explain themselves keeps placing a burden on a child who did not cause the quarrel. She makes listening look tiring, and the film gives that tiredness time to register. The attention paid to the children prevents the disputes about truth and responsibility from becoming an exercise we can enjoy solving. Her quietness remains part of the scene even when an adult has our attention.
The suspense is strong enough to satisfy someone who usually avoids domestic drama. Farhadi understands how quickly a discussion becomes frightening when admitting a mistake might cost someone more than they can bear. At 123 minutes, it asks for sustained attention and earns it through the precision of the writing and the cast. Give it an evening when nobody needs cheering up, and leave time afterwards to disagree.
