Asghar Farhadi makes family arguments gripping by giving each person enough time to sound reasonable. We rate him highly for that fairness, and for noticing what the children hear, even when his plotting becomes a little too neat.
Fi1m perspective
In A Separation (2011), a daughter listens while the adults explain themselves. Sarina Farhadi's Termeh is quiet, but her attention makes it difficult to treat the quarrel as a puzzle to be solved. We were upset by how much listening the adults required of her, because she had done nothing to cause their dispute. Asghar Farhadi lets each speaker make a plausible case, then gives somebody else a turn. He also leaves time to see what those explanations are doing to the child.
That interest in families and groups persists across his changes of setting. His feature debut, Dancing in the Dust (2003), preceded the wider recognition that came with About Elly (2009). The Past (2013), his first film made outside Iran, took family fractures into a French setting. Everybody Knows (2018) followed in Spain; A Hero (2021) returned to Iran to examine heroism, social media and institutional pressure.
The collaborators on A Separation make the arguments easy to follow without making them feel orderly. Cinematographer Mahmoud Kalari's mobile camera catches the people around whoever is speaking, so a response can matter as much as a speech. Production designer Keyvan Moghaddam's glass partitions keep people visible even when they are physically divided, without turning the home into an elaborate symbol. Editor Hayedeh Safiyari keeps the complications legible, allowing us to worry about what has been said rather than who is where. Composer Sattar Oraki's restrained music leaves us free to withhold forgiveness.
Farhadi can arrange the trouble a little too precisely. In A Separation, a difficult question occasionally arrives just when the screenplay needs another complication. For a moment, we can feel the characters being made to serve the plot, though the actors soon make their stubbornness credible again. That is a small reservation about a film we would recommend to almost anyone, not a reason to dismiss his careful construction. Start there, and keep an eye on the people who are not talking.
Biography
Asghar Farhadi is an Iranian film director, screenwriter and producer. He was born on 7 May 1972 in Homayoon Shahr (now Khomeyni Shahr) in Isfahan province. He studied dramatic arts at the University of Tehran and stage direction at Tarbiat Modares University, and began making short films as a teenager with the Youth Cinema Society of Isfahan.
Farhadi is known for films including About Elly (2009), A Separation (2011), The Past (2013), The Salesman (2016), Everybody Knows (2018) and A Hero (2021). A Separation, which he wrote, directed and produced, won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. He received a second Academy Award in the same category for The Salesman.
His wife Parisa Bakhtavar is also a filmmaker. Their daughter Sarina Farhadi appeared in A Separation.
