A Separation

A Separation (2011) begins with a couple who want to divorce and ends in a courtroom. Simin wants to leave the country; their visas have come through and she wants her daughter raised elsewhere. Nader will not go because he cares for his father, who has Alzheimer's. She files for divorce, the judge refuses, and she moves to her mother's. Nader hires a woman named Razieh to look after his father. She is pregnant and working without her husband's knowledge; she also telephones to ask whether it is religiously permissible for her to care for an old man. One day Nader comes home and finds his father on the floor, tied to the bed, with Razieh out. There is an argument and he pushes her out of the door. The next day she loses the child. A case begins and the charge rises to murder. The rest of the film is about who knew what and who is concealing what. The method is to put nobody in the wrong. Everyone's reasoning is comprehensible and everyone lies at some point, and all of them do it to protect their own child. Farhadi never fully shows the judge; the camera occupies his position and the characters speak directly into the lens. The audience is placed in the seat of judgment. The last scene is in a corridor: the daughter makes a decision and the film ends without saying what it is. It won the foreign language film Oscar, Iran's first. It also took the Golden Bear and the acting prizes in Berlin. It runs 123 minutes. Good for: moral drama, Iranian cinema, and screenplay structure. Less good for: the pace is slow, there is a lot of shouting, and the film answers nothing.