On Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation

Asghar Farhadi’s masterpiece A Separation, completed in 2011, won the Academy Award for Best
Foreign Language film. Using the format of fictional drama, the film is a commentary on the
convergence of patriarchy, religion and the law in modern day Tehran.

The film begins with a Xerox machine taking photocopies of identification papers for the lead
characters Nader and Simin who are filing for a separation. Farhadi comments on the nature of
the legal system which has a logic of its own. The opening shot is from the point-of-view
(perception-image) of the judge, asking us as viewers to judge the characters before us; except
that we cannot judge any of these very real characters, as they are fundamentally decent people.

The film comes from an image (“button-image”) that Farhadi had, of a middle aged man washing
his father with Alzheimer’s disease questioning whether the old man remembered his son. At the
same time, there is the question of Nader and Simin’s daughter Termeh and the question of
securing a better future for her (by leaving Iran for the West)

The film thus is constructed around a fundamental question: would you sacrifice the man who has
brought you up (Nader’s father) or think about your daughter and her future. In a similar vein,
Nader also represents the past as he asks Termeh to state the purified Farsi words, a symbol of
tradition, whereas Simin packs her things after the separation so that she can have a better future.
In other words, Nader represents the past and Simin the future. Farhadi underlines this in the
pivotal scene where Nader takes care of his father and Simin packs her things to secure Termeh’s
future.

The film is based around the middle-class as for Farhadi it is this class that determines the reality
of the society. The middle class exploits the working class and sneers at the aristocracy and is the
best gauge, for Farhadi, to study a society.

The two methods of studying the transformation of the cinematographic object (as stated by
Gilles Deleuze) is through Situation-Action-Situation, in which an action transforms a situation or
Action-Situation-Action, in which a situation leads to two contrasting actions. Limit-image, like the
slope on a curve, is that image where the action becomes a situation. In A Separation there are
two limit-images, one when Nader pushes the pregnant domestic help, Raziyeh and the second
when Nader forces Raziyeh to swear on the Koran stating that it was his push that indeed caused
the central event in the film: Raziyeh’s miscarriage. Swearing on the Koran is a comment on the
middle-class, represented by Nader, and their ability to exploit the piousness of the working
classes for their own gain.

Farhadi is a middle-of-the-road Iranian film-maker who combines elements of the cinema of

Kiarostami with that of more popular directors (for example his use of the car as a symbol of
slowness, as an interior within an exterior borrowed from the cinema of Kiarostami). What makes
the film so effective is Farhadi’s approach to actors. Once the script is locked, no further changes
are made; the actors identify with the interior psychology of the characters so that they ‘react’
instead of ‘act.’ In this way the psychological interiority of the character is revealed through an
event in which too much of reality makes its way. Farhadi believes that the more soft spoken a
character, the more clearly and intensely s/he is heard.

The film uses handheld camera and muted colours precisely to show this too-much-of-reality. The
use of windows are a sign that do not lead to meaning but are an indexical towards
consciousness .

The ending of the film does not tell us which parent Termeh would like to be with remind us of the
‘open’ nature of the cinematographic idiom in which images and sounds are only partially ‘closed’
much like an open refrigerator in which water is unable to become ice since the door is left ajar.