A separate truth

The internationally acclaimed Iranian drama A Separation, winner of this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, presents itself in rather modest and unassuming fashion. And that patient, low-key approach has everything to do with its success as a remarkably complex and unexpectedly affecting drama.

Initially it is a story about the impending break-up of a marriage. Simin (Leila Hatami) wants a divorce from Nader (Peyman Moadi) so that she can raise their daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi) in some place other than Iran. Nader refuses to leave his job and his ailing, aging father, and so the couple separates, but his wife stays in Iran and his daughter stays with him.

That turn of events brings another conflicted family of three into the picture. Nader hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat) as a daytime caregiver for his aged father. The caregiver, who is pregnant, must hide the fact of her employment from her husband Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), who is surly, unemployed and tradition-oriented. Her peculiar work habits are met with the displeasure of Nader, who ends up dismissing her with a literal shove out the door.

The upshot of these various domestic disputes is that both families are soon back in court. Razieh has suffered a miscarriage after Nader’s rough dismissal, and she wants him prosecuted for it. He in turn has her charged with elder abuse. Simin is not convinced her husband is innocent, and Hodjat goads Razieh on, and berates nearly everyone involved, including himself.

Nader and Simin are more modern and liberal while Razieh and Hodjat are much more tradition-bound. But writer-director Asghar Farhadi doesn’t push us to take sides. In this tale, there is no clear-cut rooting interest. Each of the main characters has some good reasons for his or her conduct, and none of the four ever seems entirely in the right.

What emerges is partly a quietly heartbreaking study in the elusiveness of truth. But it’s not simply a Rashomon-style standoff among competing versions of the truth. Rather, Farhadi’s characters are complicit in their own entrapment within whichever network of values (social, moral and sometimes spiritual) they’re trying to live by.

In a way, it’s a low-key tragic drama played out in specifics of the daily life from a particular contemporary setting and culture. It might also be taken as a critique of Iranian society, but the sober humanism implicit in Farhadi’s even-handed approach seems to transcend parochial and polemical concerns.

A couple of key events in the story are only half-seen, from the limited point-of-view of a single character, and Farhadi excels at underlining the characters’ uncertainties and quandaries with semi-obstructed angles of vision, casually incomplete observation of detail, “blind spots” in the ongoing action, etc.

A remarkably patient judge (Babak Karimi) does what he can to sort things out in the court scenes (which take place mostly in a tiny office). But the most haunting judgment of all comes in a glance exchanged, near the end, between Termeh, daughter of Simin and Nader, and Somayeh, daughter of Razieh and Hodjat.