Delayed Reaction: A Separation

The Pitch: So, The Salesman won the foreign film Oscar a couple years ago, and everyone was like "That's a dumb pick. Asghar Farhadi's last movie, A Separation, was so much better." What I took from that is, "See A Separation."

A family going through emotional hardships and a family going through financial hardships clash after a pair of possible crimes lead to a deadly accident.

I don't know how it works for other people, but I tend to categorize movies I need to see in my mind into a few different groups:

• There are the "homework movies": Universally acclaimed classics. Despite my derogatory nickname, I end up liking these movies at a higher rate than my other categories.
• There are the "conversation movies": Popular or modern movies that I need to see so that I can take part in the larger pop culture discussion. That's entirely why I had my Club 50 project until a couple years ago.
• There are the "bad movies": movies I'm committed to seeing because I'm determined to see everything with Actress/Actor X (I've seen so many Rose Byne movie) in it, or some plot mechanic sounds really cool (Example: Phone Booth, Buried, Locke, or apparently anything set in a single location).
• Finally there are the "consensus movies": movies that, even if I don't hear people constantly gushing about them, I can never recall someone saying a bad thing about them.

A Separation is in that last group. All I really know about it is that it dominated all the Foreign Film categories at awards ceremonies the year it was released and no one bristled against that dominance. I don't recall ever hearing a discussion about it, but I've heard a lot of offhand mentions that reference it as a good movie.

And, it is a good movie. I struggle to think of how someone could come away from it saying "that's a bad movie". Granted, that's different from someone saying "I didn't like it". I do understand those people. It's a movie about some fairly unlikable people in a very unlikable situation. Nader (Payman Maadi) and his wife, Simin (Leila Hatami), are splitting up. Nader employs a woman to take care of his father with Alzheimers. She's not really equipped for that kind of work. And she has an out-of-work husband* who is a bit of a loose canon. This is a bad cocktail when you mix in the accident that ends with the woman having a miscarriage. The drama of seeing how it all unfolds and trying to sort out who deserves blame keeps the movie interesting throughout. Any moderate fan of messy family dramas should really check this out.

*It's about here that I'm going to admit that I lost track of all the names, and it could probably be tied back to me being an entitled American in some way.

I will say that I sided strongly with the Payman Maadi character. In addition to being our primary POV character, it really felt like he was being charged with a crime several levels above what he actually did. And the movie, without ever explicitly siding with him, stacks the deck of circumstantial stuff on his side. The woman he hires, Razieh (I looked it up), nearly killed his father by tying him to the bed, there's something about missing money, she's being cagey about why she disappeared, we see her having pains earlier, and we see the steps she falls down being dirty or wet before the incident. Granted, I also don't fully understand how the law works in Iran, so maybe I'm judging the whole situation too much from an American legal perspective. Short of studying Iranian law, I'm not sure how I could get around that. Nader's greatest sin is his pride, which really makes a mess of things toward the end.

I'm not a huge fan of the very end. Not because it's bad. In fact, it's emotionally wrecking and beautifully acted. The way the daughter can't vocalize her choice of who she wants to live with might be my favorite scene of the movie. And the credits playing over the two parents silently sitting in the hall fits well for the title. The story of the parents separating is secondary for most of the movie. Reshifting the focus to that at the very end is an awkward fit. It's like looking at a picture of a dog playing in a field then telling me that it's actually about urban decay. Sure, that might be in there too, but pretending that it's the main focus the whole time is a little disingenuous*. So, it's a good movie that maybe doesn't all fit together perfectly.

*OK, here's a better example. The Life of Pi (I'm sticking with the movie here) opens by telling you it's a story that will make you believe in god. The bulk of the movie is the story of a boy on a boat with a tiger (that might be a metaphor) that really has nothing to do with that mission statement. Then it ends pretending that it was about that all along. There's a disconnect between the content and how the filmmaker interprets it.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend