"Beautiful City" - Asghar Farhadi (2004)

Asghar Farhadi’s second feature film, Beautiful City (Shahr-e-Ziba, 2004), was a demonstration that the youthful writer-director’s cinematic prowess was already well-formed [1,2].  Like his subsequent and more well-known films – Fireworks Wednesday (Chaharshanbe Suri, 2006), About Elly (Darbarye Elly, 2009), A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin, 2011), The Past (Le Passé, 2013), and The Salesman (Forushande, 2016) – this earlier film featured an  examination of complex issues associated with serious interpersonal relations and engagement. And also like those later films, the title of the film had an ironic and somewhat ambiguous connotation.  Shahr-e-Ziba is the name of a neighborhood in northwestern Tehran where the government’s Juvenile Detention Center (a prison for the underaged) is located.  The action in this film begins in that center and concerns the fate of two young men who have been detained there. 

At the start of the film, the teenage prisoners in the Juvenile Detention Center stage a boisterous and officially disallowed birthday party for one of their members, Akbar (played by Hossein Farzi-Zadeh).  The party was triggered by Akbar’s rowdy pal A'la Pour Salehi (Babak Ansari).  But far from appreciating the party thrown for him, Akbar suffers from a fit of depression, because since he has now reached 18 years of age, Akbar realizes that he can be immediately transferred to an adult prison and ultimately executed for the crime he had committed.  Two years earlier, Akbar had been convicted of murdering his girlfriend, Maliheh, but because he was only 16 at the time, he was a juvenile and could not be hanged for his crime.  Now he is no longer a juvenile. Soon Akbar is taken away in a truck to another prison.  This is the last time the character Akbar appears physically in the film, but the question of his fate remains at the center of the story.

When A'la realizes and comes to dwell on his friend’s dire fate, he starts plotting ways he can escape the detention center and try to save Akbar’s life.  He is aided by a sympathetic detention center guard, Ghafoori (Farhad Ghaemian), who feels Akbar is a redeemable soul.  Ghafoori fakes some records in order to arrange for A’la to get an early release in the hopes that A’la can do something for Akbar on the outside. 

One of the reasons why Beautiful City has not had such widespread international distribution as Farhadi’s subsequent films is that its narrative requires the viewer to have some understanding of Iran’s implementation of the Muslim-based penal code.  In connection with capital punishment, this entails some significant differences from policies carried out in Western societies.  In particular, a convicted murderer can have his death sentence commuted if his victim’s family consents to offering their forgiveness.  This entails the murderer’s family offering “blood money” to the victim’s family as some sort of compensation and an act of contrition.  Iranian scholar Homa Omid (Professor Haleh Afshar) offers more details on the subject [3]:

“Murder is punished by retribution; but the murderer can opt for the payment of diyat, blood money, to the descendants of the murdered, in lieu of punishment (Article 1 of diyat laws).  Whereas killing a man is a capital offence, murdering a woman is a lesser crime:

Should a Muslim man wilfully murder a Muslim woman, he must be killed, but the murderer can be punished only after the woman’s guardian has paid half of his khounbaha (blood money, or the sum that the man would be worth if he were to live a normal life; this is negotiated with and paid to the man’s family) (article 5 of the Qassas laws).

By contrast, women murderers have no blood money and must be executed (article 6).  Similarly violent attacks against women, resulting in maiming or severe injuries, can only be punished after payment of mutilation money to the male assailant before retribution can be administered.  The reverse does not apply (article 60).”

So with respect to  Beautiful City, these laws mean that Akbar can avoid execution if his dead girlfriend’s father, Abolqasem Rahmati (Faramarz Gharibian), can be convinced to give his consent to forgiveness.  The sympathetic Ghafoori had already tried and failed several times to get this consent from Abolqasem, and now it is up to A’la to see if he can convince the bitter old man  to sign the consent.

What makes Beautiful City particularly interesting, though, is not just Akbar’s fate but more the presentation of an interactive matrix of attitudes concerning how we respond when things don’t go the way we want.  In this connection I detect four categorical attitudes that drive people in these circumstances and that Farhadi has on display in the film:

• Revenge (R), retaliation, and “justice”. Someone must be found to “pay the price” for what has gone wrong. For many people, it is an “eye for an eye” world, and they get psychological satisfaction from seeing someone punished.  When I ask many sincerely religious people why they support capital punishment, they say they support it, not because it might deter future capital crimes, but merely for the sake of “justice”.  For them punishment is a reward for the rest of us.
   
• Compassion (C) and forgiveness. On the other side is the feeling of compassion for one’s fellow beings.  This involves seeing the potential for godliness in everyone, even criminals.  Everyone can be rehabilitated and connected with the god that is always there inside of him or her.
   
• Utilitarianism (U). One makes the best, in terms of personal utility, of whatever situation one finds oneself in.  This can even encompass the idea of doing seemingly selfless deeds and showing compassion in order to enhance one’s reputation.  In the context of when something or someone has gone wrong, it can often mean just forgetting about it and moving on.  Most people are counseled to follow this path.
   
• Love (L).  True love is in a category all its own.  By this I don’t mean brotherly love or compassion – that category (C)  has already been mentioned.  And I don’t mean the ego-boosting feeling of being desired romantically (U). True love is the delirious and irrational desire to give oneself totally to one’s beloved.

The main characters in Beautiful City take on some of these attitudes at various times as the narrative plays out. In particular, principal character A’la takes on all four of these attitudes at various points in the story.

Note that almost all religions, intended as they are to be universal, have doctrines and rules that cover all four of these attitudes.  But as we see in Beautiful City, there can be complicated situations for which none of these attitudes offers a clear path, and religious doctrine may not offer a solution, either.

Continuing with our account of the story of Beautiful City, when A’la is released from the detention center, Ghafoori drops him off at the home of Akbar’s only living relative, his older sister Firoozeh (Taraneh Alidoosti).  The beautiful and expressive Taraneh Alidoosti, by the way, has appeared in a number of Farhadi’s films (Fireworks Wednesday, 2006; About Elly, 2009; and The Salesman, 2016), and her performance here is a crucial element in this film’s effectiveness.

Firoozeh has a small baby and lives in an apartment in front of which there is a soda pop stand operated by a man who appears to be her husband.  Firoozeh tells A’la that she has been trying for two years to convince Abolqasem to consent to commute Akbar’s death sentence, but the stubborn man won’t budge.  A’la and Firoozeh agree, however, to keep trying.

Soon A’la and Firoozeh are virtually camped out in front of Abolqasem’s home as they accost him daily with entreaties for forgiveness. A’la reflexively feels vengeful (R) when he sees Abolqasem abuse Firoozeh, but Firoozeh reminds A’la that retaliation won’t work (U).  Then A’la, in turn, urges Abolqasem not to feel hateful (R); and seeing that the taciturn Abolqasem is very religious, he invokes religious arguments to support his pleas.  He tells Abolqasem to leave things in God’s hands –

“God knows justice better than you and me. . . . If you don’t accept my words, then you don’t truly believe in God.”

Abolqasem is silent and doesn’t argue with his petitioners; but he wants to get these people off his back, and he consults a government office as to how he can get Akbar executed soon.  The government official tells him, as Homa  Omid’s account explains above, that he will have to supply blood money to the perpetrator’s family, but this is money that the out-of-work Abolqasem doesn’t have.

Then a new wrinkle appears when Firoozeh and A’la meet Abolqasem’s wife.  This woman is Abolqasem’s second wife, his first wife, who was the mother of the murdered Maliheh, having passed away some time ago.  The present wife has a seriously disabled teenage daughter, Somayeh, from an earlier marriage of her own, and she thinks she can convince Abolqasem to consent to forgiveness if Firoozeh can pay them 3-4 million tomans (~US$ 5,000) for a needed medical operation for her crippled daughter.  However, this is money that neither Firoozeh nor A’la have.

So now we have a number of attitudes expressed.  Abolqasem feels vengeful (R); Ghafoori, A’la, and Firoozeh feel compassion for Akbar (C); and Abolqasem’s wife feels compassion for her daughter (C,U) and some compassion for Akbar (C).      

A’la and Firoozeh approach the mullah at the local mosque that Abolqasem attends, and he agrees to remind Abolqasem that God is always the most merciful and compassionate.  But the mullah’s words fall on Abolqasem’s deaf ears, as the vengeful man goes about trying to get support from others for his required blood money.  In fact he tells the mullah that if God wants him to forgive, then he has a problem with God.

Meanwhile A’la and Firoozeh keep up their low-pressure entreaties to Abolqasem.  And in the process, as A’la and Firoozeh become more familiar with each other, they begin to feel a growing mutual attraction (L?).  Their growing enamoredness is one of the best features of the film, because it comes off in a subtle and natural way.  Indeed A’la and Firoozeh are not really a natural match when they learn more about each other.  A’la is three or four years younger than Firoozeh, is unemployed, and has spent seven years in prison.  Firoozeh is divorced from the kiosk owner, but she had to sell herself to support her junkie husband’s drug habit when they were married. And she now has a baby to look after.  But despite these facts and their various awkward missteps, the two of them gradually click.

When he hears that Abolqasem is planning to sell his home in order to get the needed blood money, A’la rushes to the mullah and asks him to intervene.  But the mullah says Abolqasem has the right to retaliation, and it is not his position to intercede.  A’la instinctively responds,

“Which right?  He wants to make his family homeless to pay for the blood money.  . . . even a 5-year-old kid knows which is better.”

A’la then tells Firoozeh that he wants to steal enough money to pay for the blood money (he claims he is an expert thief), but she adamantly refuses his offer.  She doesn’t want him to go to jail again, and for her that’s not the proper direction to take.

Eventually Abolqasem’s wife comes up with another plan.  If A’la will agree to marry her crippled and homely daughter, Somayeh, then the wife can definitely get Abolqasem to sign the consent letter saving Akbar’s life.  This is the film’s final dilemma.  C, U, and L (Compassion, Utility, and Love) all point in different directions here, and religious counsel hasn’t helped, either. 

A’la rushes to the hospital where Firoozeh works and asks from outside the fence what he should do.  But Firoozeh doesn’t know what to tell him.  A’la insists he would do it (marry Somayeh) for Firoozeh’s sake, i.e. not for utilitarian or compassionate reasons, but because he loves Firoozeh.  But Firoozeh frowns and tells him that because she is 3-4 years older and with a child, she’s no good for him.  Then they have the following exchange:

Firoozeh: “Don’t think that because I paid attention to you for one or two days, it was out of love.”

A’la: “You’re lying!”

Firoozeh: “Don’t count on me.”

A’la then goes to Ghafoori for advice. Ghafoori advocates a utilitarian decision – forget about Akbar (C) and Firoozeh (L) and move on.   But A’la says he cannot ever forget about Firoozeh and is convinced that she really loves him, too.  For him this is true love.  Ghafoori then concedes that true love can be overwhelming and dominate all other considerations – A’la will have to make his own decision.

With the sympathetic Ghafoori watching from a distance, A’la returns to Firoozeh’s home to speak to her again.  But she is not answering the door bell as the film ends.


The production values of Beautiful City are excellent throughout.  Particularly effective is the camera work, which is devoid of the shaky hand-held camera operations that wold infect some of Farhadi’s later films.  The acting and editing, too, which maintain a smooth rhythm across the various reaction shots of the troubled characters, are also very good. In fact, all the characters are sympathetically portrayed, and the viewer can empathize with their feelings.  It is just that those feelings point in different, perhaps irreconcilable, directions.

Overall, I would say this is one of Farhadi’s best films, and it deserves more exposure. Like some of Farhadi’s subsequent films, the viewer is left without knowing the final resolution, but with something to contemplate. 

What do you think A’la will do in the end?  What would you do?
★★★★

Notes:

1. Parisa Vaziri, “BEAUTIFUL CITY”, Film-forward.com, (15 March 2006).   
2. Ken Fox, “Beautiful City”, TV Guide (n.d.).  
3. Homa Omid (Haleh Afshar), Islam and the Post-Revolutionary State in Iran, Palgrave Macmillan (1994), p. 182.   

"The Salesman" - Asghar Farhadi (2016)

Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman (Forushande, 2016) is another dramatic tale of evolving marital disharmony that has almost become this Iranian writer-director’s trademark.  Similar to his previous films – such as Fireworks Wednesday (2006), About Elly (2009), A Separation (2011), and The Past (2013) – Farhadi presents in The Salesman a young middle-class couple whose relationship is subjected to a tragic, disruptive event.  What makes all those films particularly interesting is the way Farhadi presents multiple perspectives with respect to what is going on.   So what may seem to be clear-cut from one point of view may look entirely different when seen through a different contextual lens.  Although it takes awhile to get there, this multiple-viewpoint tableau comes to the fore in The Salesman, too.

In addition to, and related to, this multiple-viewpoint issue are social themes that often show up in Farhad’s films.  Some of them are particularly significant for the Iranian social context, but they can be appreciated by everyone.  Here are a few of them:

• Establishing and declaring what is "true".  When there are multiple perspectives, there are likely to be multiple interpretations concerning what is factually true.  In the physical world of nature, there are often statements that are either true or false.  But in the world of human sociality, there are overlapping social layers, each with its normative context, and we are all accustomed to seeing things from multiple vantage points.  Getting along in larger society, then, often means making some pretenses or obscuring some private information in order to obscure ethical conflicts that arise.  Thus we selectively offer some “edited” information to others in order to make things go smoothly.  Iranians, in particular, are often inclined to obligingly tell people what they think their audience wants to hear.  This issue is notably important in About Elly and A Separation, but it comes up in The Salesman, too.
   
• The importance of a private living space.  We are all aware of the distinction between public space and private space, which are governed by differing norms. In Iran this is very important.  Many Iranians greatly value the sanctity of their privates spaces, where they can act relatively freely and not be subjected to oppressive societal restrictions [1].  A violation of one’s private space can be felt as a personal and distressful affront.
   
• Maintaining face.  Although people treasure their private lives, they also want to be respected in the public space.  This can mean engaging in some form of social salesmanship in order to maintain their public image and not be subject to social ridicule. (It can also mean that people are deterred from going to the police when criminalized in order to avoid having their lives opened up to public inspection.)
   
• Revenge.  Vengeance is often a big issue with men, and losing face is one of the primary motivations for it.  Often the desired revenge is to humiliate and emasculate the offending party, thereby making that person suffer the horror of losing face.
   
• Forgiveness.  An alternative, but seldom seen, response to an offense is forgiveness. All religions commend acts of forgiveness, but how often do we see it unless the offending party humiliates himself by begging for forgiveness? 

The story of The Salesman concerns the events surrounding a young married couple, Emad (played by Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti).  By day, Emad is a charismatic teacher of literature at a senior secondary school.  In the evenings, both Emad and Rana are actors in a theatrical company, which is currently engaged in rehearsing and performing Arthur Miller’s prize-winning play, Death of a Salesman (1949).  In the play, Emad plays the role of the ill-fated main character, Willy Loman, while Rana plays the role of Willy’s wife, Linda.  Throughout the film, Emad and Rana are sometimes shown engaged in their theatrical stage performances.  In the course of these presentations, we see how their dramatic personae give both of them masks that serve two seemingly conflicting purposes: 

1. to hide their true selves and present their public faces
2. to partially shield themselves so that they can express their true emotions as if  they were coming from someone else. 

The film’s narrative passes through four somewhat disjointed acts.

1.  Emad and Rana 
The film opens disturbingly with Emad and Rana in their apartment, which starts shaking violently.  What seems like an earthquake turns out to be a destabilized foundation caused by nearby construction equipment, but the results are no less ominous.  Their building nearly collapses, and Emad and Rana are forced to evacuate and look immediately for new living quarters.  All of this is presented very realistically by Farhadi, and it sets a tone about how one’s comfortable home can be suddenly disrupted by an external event.

Also shown are Emad and Rana’s activities, including their work on the locally-produced staging of Death of a Salesman.  One of the issues of staging such a play, by the way, is getting it past the restrictive government censors, who are always demanding scene cuts, and this is briefly depicted. 

One of their fellow actors in the play, Babak (Babak Karimi), arranges for Emad and Rana to get a newly available apartment, no easy task on short notice in Tehran.  The apartment’s previous tenant has left some of her personal belongings in a locked room, the inconvenience of which irritates Rana.  Emad, however, is more respectful of the woman’s private items and tries to mollify his wife. 

2.  An Intruder Comes
One day while waiting for Emad to come home, Rana hears the downstairs entry buzzer go off, and assuming it is Emad, she pushes the button allowing entry and unlocks the apartment front door.  Then she goes to take a shower.  What happens next is unclear, but we know that an intruder entered the apartment and assaulted Rana.  It will later be revealed that the previous tenant of the apartment they are now occupying was a prostitute who had many male clients.  When Emad comes home shortly thereafter he sees bloody footprints on the apartment staircase and learns that Rana was discovered by neighbors after the attack and taken to the hospital.

Rana is soon released, but it is clear that the attack has shattered her.  She doesn’t want to talk about it to Emad (Farhadi was probably limited in what he could portray anyway), and she seems dazed and confused.  Although Emad is solicitous, he seems more concerned about his own impotence in this matter than willing to attend to Rana’s agony.  In short order he begins to lose patience with her silent suffering.

3.  The Hunt for the Perpetrator
Now the focus of the narrative shifts over squarely on Emad. They are not going to go the police about the matter, assuming this would only bring more trouble upon themselves, so Emad sets about trying to find the culprit.  Rana says she cannot remember what happened or even what the assailant looked like, so Emad doesn’t have much to go on.  But he does discover some money, some keys, and a mobile phone that were left in haste by the assailant, and with these he starts trying to hunt him down.

This part of the film evolves more like a conventional detective story, with Emad bumbling away but gradually uncovering some clues.  He also appears to be becoming more obsessed with taking revenge as he starts get closer to catching someone.

4.  The Perpetrator Found
Eventually and after a number of improbable events, Emad does discover and trap Rana’s assailant.  He turns out not to be the person Emad originally suspected, but instead a very unexceptional and vulnerable individual (well portrayed by Farid Sajjadi Hosseini).  It is at this point that the viewer starts seeing the vengeance story line from multiple perspectives.  This is also the most interesting and moving part of the film.  Emad is unsure of what he wants at this point, but since he feels he, himself, was humiliated, he wants to subject the assailant to maximal humiliation.  This is the revenge mentality.  If a man loses face, he wants his enemy to lose even more face.

The final events are disturbing, and you are left at the end to reflect on the states of mind of Emad and Rana, as well as on the fate of their relationship and whether any forgiveness will be forthcoming.


In some ways The Salesman is more like Fireworks Wednesday than Farhadi’s subsequent films, and this is unfortunate [2].  About Elly, A Separation, and The Past had social fabrics that were more sophisticated and multilayered than what appears in The Salesman.  What we witness in this film is a decent man with respectable, civilized values who gradually and unwillingly, debases himself.  It can be painful to watch.

There are also some weaknesses to the film.  Babak appears to be a significant character over the first part of the film, and the viewer is given some information about him that seems likely to be important later.  But in the final parts of the film, Babak more or less disappears from sight, and that seems to leave a hole in the story.  In addition Rana is gradually overlooked as the film progresses.  Whether or not Emad sees her as “damaged goods”, he doesn’t seem to be much of a sympathetic partner.  Although some reviewers seem to empathize fully with Emad’s frustrations over Rana [3], I find Emad to be ultimately too self-obsessed, and this reduces my engagement with the film.  This is another aspect of The Salesman that harkens back to Fireworks Wednesday – focalized characters from whom we disengage.

Another problem is shaky hand-held camera work, particularly in the first half of the film, that is more than just bothersome. There seems to be little motivation to these movements, as if the camera operator were just wandering randomly about the set and trying to keep the principals in frame.  Presumably this jittery movement is supposed to induce emotional agitation, and it can be justified in some circumstances, such as when a building is collapsing.  But unfortunately the jerky camera is used in far too many situations in this film.  The camera movements here are not comparable to those of people like Antonioni and Mizoguchi, for whose films the camera movements actually enhance the psychological immersion of the viewer.  There are also fixed-frame closeups that should be filmed with a fixed camera, but are instead evidently hand-held.  All of these things call unnecessary attention to the camera work and reduce the viewer’s psychological involvement in the narrative. 

Farhadi’s earlier films also suffered from an over-use of jittery hand-held camera techniques, but this was significantly reduced in his preceding film, The Past.  That film had a different cinematographer, Mahmoud Kalari (he was also the cinematographer for A Separation).  For The Salesman Farhdi’s cinematographer was Hossein Jafarian, who had been the cinematographer for Fireworks Wednesday and About Elly. Whomever Farhadi uses as his cinematographer in his next film, I hope that he attends to more controlled and fluid camera usage.

Despite these shortcomings, Farhadi’s The Salesman is worth seeing, though no match for his sublime About Elly.  The Salesman does come together as it approaches the end, and the pacing and acting performances are first-rate. Especially effective is the use of Taraneh Alidoosti’s silent but expressive countenance in reaction shots to convey a mood, echoing a visual technique Farhadi used with her in Fireworks Wednesday and About Elly.  They all contribute to the film’s presentation of a gradual unraveling of a man we can understand and to whom we can relate. 

At Emad’s school where he taught literature, he was a respected role model who seemed to know what is right.  And at one point earlier in the film, Emad is traveling somewhere in a taxi cab with one of his students, and Emad is insulted by a self-righteous woman sitting next to him (taxis in Tehran usually take multiple fares and have them all sit together).  Afterwards, the student expresses his angry sympathy for his esteemed teacher in the face of the woman’s rude behavior.  But Emad takes the high road on this occasion and tells the student that we should forgive the woman – she probably had suffered from some earlier incident in a taxi that had ruined her civility.  This was the high-principled Emad talking, before he himself lost face and began to lose his bearings.  At the end he has become a salesman (of himself) who doesn’t believe in what he is selling.
★★★

Notes:

1. Hooman Majd, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran, (2009), Anchor. 
2. Peter Bradshaw, “The Salesman review: Asghar Farhadi offers layers of Willy Loman”,  The Guardian, (21 May 2016).
3. Owen Gleiberman, “Cannes Film Review: ‘The Salesman’”, Variety, (20 May 2016).

"The Past" - Asghar Farhadi (2013)

After achieving international success and an Oscar with A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin, 2011), Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi undertook the bold move of making a film outside his native Iran and in a language that was not his own. Farhadi’s The Past (Le Passé, 2013) is set in Paris and in French, but his singular dramatic style was unattenuated by these shifts.  The film was nominated for the Palme d’Or, and its female lead, Bérénice Bejo, won the Best Actress Award at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.

The film continues with Farhadi’s focus on the difficulties that marital relationships have in modern society when the two partners have conflicting interests, as was the case with his three preceding works: Fireworks Wednesday (Chaharshanbe Suri, 2006), About Elly (Darbarye Elly, 2009), and the aforementioned A Separation (2011). But actually, what makes Farhadi’s films interesting is not just the issue of marital harmony, but a more fundamental and underlying theme: how can we achieve a shared understanding of what is true. 

We often have the sometimes naive faith that there is a single objective truth towards which we can all converge.  This can be the case when we observe the natural world with scientifically verified measuring devices.  But in the complex affairs of human engagement, the observer can have great difficulty arriving at any form of truly objective truth.  In these circumstances there is often a complex mixture of causal agents, each with unarticulated goals and histories. In attempts to explain what has happened, everyone may have their own slightly different version of just what did happen and what were the underlying causes of those events. So telling the objective truth may not be feasible.  Moreover and given these circumstances, we may need to modify or edit what we think is true in accordance with the social context. This was the major  theme of Farhadi’s masterpiece (to date) About Elly, and he continues exploring issues along these line in The Past.

There is another, closely related, theme covered in the film and that concerns the shifting degrees of authority – one can almost say, “territoriality” – that take place in modern life. With modern familial relations so complicated, the determination of who is truth’s arbiter (particularly towards children) in those circumstance can be difficult. Writer-director Farhadi fashions a plot for this film that brings all these issues to the fore.

The story of The Past covers a period of a few days and concerns the visit of an Iranian man who has returned from Tehran back to Paris after an absence of four years so that he can finalize a divorce from his French wife.  As with Farhadi’s other films, the narrative device of slow disclosure is used to tell the story, and the viewer must gradually piece together various scraps of information in order to discern the relationships and issues.  Thus the viewer is all the way, just like all the characters in the film, trying to establish what is true. Although at the film’s outset the wife is shown cordially greeting her estranged husband at the airport, the viewer soon learns that their relationship somehow fell apart four years ago.  Even in the car on the way home, they start needling each other and getting under each others’ skins.

There are seven principal characters in the story, and after awhile one learns how they are related.

• Ahmad (played by Ali Mosaffa) is the Iranian husband who has returned to Paris for a visit after four years.
• Marie-Anne Brisson (Bérénice Bejo) is his estranged wife, who is the mother of two children fathered by husbands previous to Ahmad.  She works in a Paris pharmacy and lives with her two daughters in a house she once shared with Ahmad about ten miles outside the city.
• Lucie (Pauline Burlet) is Marie’s 16-year-old daughter.
• Léa (Jeanne Jestin) is Marie’s daughter of about eight years of age
• Samir (Tahar Rahim) is a French Arab and Marie’s current lover.  He runs a dry-cleaning shop in Paris within walking distance of Marie’s pharmacy, and he has a flat above the shop.
• Fouad (Elyes Aguis) is Samir’s 6-year-old son.
• Naïma (Sabrina Ouazani) is a French Arab woman who works in Samir’s dry-cleaning shop.

As the story unfolds Ahmad is seen to be the person who believes most in open honesty.  He evidently has faith in the idea that a shared truth can be established if we just tell everyone what we know. But his policy of sharing what he has heard only causes problems. The two little children, Lea and Fouad, do not have seemingly important roles, but they are spectators, like the film’s viewers, who are trying to make sense of the agonizing adults around them.  They are also just about the only ones in the film who ever smile; the rest of the characters seem to be uniformly unhappy with their lives.  This, in fact, points to one of the weaknesses of the film – the unrelentingly bad tempers of the principal characters, which casts a pall over the story that is only relieved occasionally by the appearance of the little kids.

The Story

The narrative structure can be seen as partitioned into three phases. In the first phase, the viewer is introduced to Ahmad, Marie, and Samir.  At the start, Ahmad and Marie meet at the airport, and Marie takes Ahmad back to her home.  Marie tells Ahmad that her daughter Lucie has been “giving her hell for the past two months”, and asks Ahmad to see if he can find out why.  Although Marie and Ahmad are quick to bicker with each other, there appears to be unresolved issues and still some tentative interest between them. Any thoughts of restoring the relationship, however, are soon squashed when Ahmad discovers that Samir and his son Fouad have moved in with Marie at the house, a fact that makes Ahmad noticeably uncomfortable. Soon, while Samir is away from the home, Fouad misbehaves, and we see how differently Marie and Ahmad attempt to deal with the impudent boy.  While Marie is short-tempered and punitive, Ahmad tries gently to reason with the boy.

Later Marie goes to the dry-cleaners to meet Samir, and it is clear that Samir is very uneasy about Marie’s former husband staying in the home (he had thought Ahmad would be put up at a hotel for his short visit to take care of the civil divorce proceedings).  In fact the tension between Marie and Samir is palpable at this point, and the prickly-tempered Marie scolds him by saying, “you can’t say whatever you want and then apologize”.  This is just one of many examples where people interpret what has been said in a negative way. Marie then goes to work at her pharmacy.

Meanwhile Ahmad at home reacquaints himself with Marie’s two daughters.  He learns from the older daughter, Lucie, that Samir is already married to a woman, Celine, but that she is currently comatose in a hospital. The reasons for why she is in a coma will be a major concern the rest of the way.  All we know is that Lucie is disturbed by the situation, and she holds Samir to blame and despises him.  In addition she suffers over the idea of her mother having new lovers all the time, and she complains, “since I was born my mom has changed guys three times” (one of those “guys”, of course, was Ahmad, himself).

Then in the final part of this first phase of the film, Ahmad and Marie go to the court the next day to take care of their divorce. 

The second phase of the narrative shifts its focus and is centered around Lucie and her desire to run away from home.  Ahmad is the only person she will talk to, and so he tries to spend some time with her to straighten things out.  Lucie reveals that Samir’s wife Celine is in a coma because she attempted suicide, and moreover, Lucie is sure that this came about because Celine was jealous about Samir’s affair with Marie.  Ahmad, who believes that airing everything out in the open is the best solution and that nothing should be kept hidden, tells Marie about Lucie’s suspicions.  Upon hearing this accusation, though, the volatile Marie goes ballistic and physically throttles her own daughter in anger.

The narrative focus shifts again in the third phase of the plot, this time to Samir, who has been largely a background character up to this point. We learn that there is an alternative possible explanation to account for Celine’s attempted suicide that involves the dry-cleaning assistant Naïma, and Samir holds on to this possibility. But in the end, the true explanation of what lay behind Celine’s act – an explanation of the past – proves to be elusive.  All we know is the present: that Celine remains in a permanent vegetative state, and that the lives of the others in this story are very gloomy indeed.

Themes

In the final analysis, the various characters are left with four plausible causes (i.e. guilty parties) for Celine's suicide:

• Samir
• Samir & Marie
• Lucie
• Naima

At the end the viewer, as well as these characters, themselves, are left with the problem of determining the causal responsibilities, which remain obscure.

It's a fascinating concoction, but there are a couple of elements in The Past that detract from its best possible realization. One, as already mentioned, concerns the persistent bad tempers of the characters. Everyone, except the two little kids, is in a very unhappy state, and the relentless bickering can be wearing.  This was also a problem that afflicted the earlier Fireworks Wednesday, and Farhadi has fallen back into it here.

A second difficulty concerns Farhadi’s close-to-the-vest use of slow disclosure, which is probably over-extended here.  It takes the viewer a relatively long time to discern some important facts that are crucial to understanding the story.  These include the following:

• Samir’s wife, Celine, attempted suicide 8 months ago
• Samir and Fouad have been living with Marie for 2 months
• Marie is 2 months pregnant with Samir's child
• Lucie has been giving Marie hell for 2 months

Once we learn the first three items, we can calibrate when the relationship between Marie and Lucie finally broke down (2 months ago – though we also eventually learn that as far as Lucie was concerned, her relationship with Marie had broken down much earlier, at least 8 months ago). 

In this connection Farhadi’s use of slow disclosure presents another problem.  I have compared Farhadi’s cinematic style to that of Michelangelo Antonioni [1] before, but in this instance we can mark a difference.  Both directors feature complex ensemble acting involving characters who are struggling to establish meaningful relationships.  But whereas in Antonioni’s work we “get inside” his principal characters and empathize with them, here in The Past it is difficult to do that because of the way Farhadi has concealed from his audience important aspects of what his characters are thinking.  Of course, this is part of Farhadi’s scheme, since figuring out what people are thinking is an important aspect of The Past.  But it does make it more difficult for the viewer to empathize with his characters.

There are other aspects of The Past, however, that more than make up for those detractions.  The acting in the film is outstanding.  Each character is well-realized, and they all play together beautifully in spontaneous, natural interactions.  Bérénice Bejo won a Cannes Film Festival acting award, but the others are equally meritorious.  In particular, the performances of the two little kids are amazing, especially that of Elyes Aguis in the role of Fouad.  I don’t think I can recall a young child giving a better performance on film.

The cinematography is also excellent.  There are complex interactive scenes with multiple characters, but Farhadi’s camera work is fluid and natural throughout.  He has finally discarded the use of a shaky hand-held camera to convey agitation, and that is a big plus in this film. 

Indeed, the themes of the film are very well embodied by the various principle characters with respect to their attitudes concerning important events of the past and how their memories of them affect their understanding of what is “true”:

• Lucie feels guilt and anguish about the past in connection with her own malicious act of telling what she believes to be the truth.
• Naïma wanted to free herself from suspicion about the past by telling a lie.
• Marie wants to cut all her ties with the past. She wants to forget the past and the people associated with it completely and start over.
• Ahmad is the empathetic one and tries to bring people together into a harmonious present.  But he seeks to do this by exposing everything in the naive belief that he can establish a single ontology.  He wants to achieve harmony by establishing a mutually agreed-upon truth.  But his efforts in this regard lead to disaster almost every time.  As Ahmad is getting ready to leave the house and go back to Tehran, he has a brief conversation with Marie in one last attempt to establish some common ground – there’s something he wants to tell Marie, about why he left four years ago, and he says,
  

  “I want to explain why I didn’t . . . “. 

  But Marie cuts him off and says she’s not interested.  She just wants to forget the past.
• Samir, the person on whom the camera closes at the end of the film, cannot let go of the past.  The past is still present for him.

Those closing camera shots of the film are particularly notable, and they leave a lasting effect on the viewer.  The second to the last shot in the film is a one-minute-long tracking shot following Samir around in the hospital.  This is followed by a single, extraordinary shot lasting five minutes and thirty second that tracks the movements of Samir that close the film.  By slowing down the pace of the film in this way, Farhadi has extracted us from the past and brought us into Samir’s agonizingly interminable and inescapable present.

★★★½

Notes:

1. “About Elly”, The Film Sufi, 15 April 2012.

"About Elly" - Asghar Farhadi (2009)

When middle-class Iranians in Tehran have a holiday, they often like to escape their dry urban confines and trek up north to the Caspian seaside, where everything is cooler and greener. It’s also an opportunity for people to be a little more casual and relaxed in the open air. About Elly (Darbareye Elly, 2009) is a deceptively clever film about one such holiday visit, where events don’t go exactly as planned.  Over the course of the three-day weekend by the sea, the viewer is exposed to the fascinatingly complex social dynamics of people under stress.  In particular, this film has things to say about some of the nuances of Iranian culture under these circumstances (but, of course, much of what happens relates generally to how all of us interact with others).

The film was written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, whose subsequent production was the more famous and highly praised A Separation (2011), which won the US Oscar for Best Foreign Film.  Without diminishing the excellence of A Separation, however, I would say that About Elly is even better and is Farhadi’s best work so far.

The principal characters are a group of holiday travelers who are linked by old friendships formed years before at law school: 

• Amir and Sepideh are a married couple whose daughter, Moravid, is in kindergarten.
• Peyman and Shohreh are a second couple with a little boy and girl, Arash and Anita.
• Manouchehr and Naazy are a third couple.
• Ahmad, also an old friend in addition to being Naazy’s brother, has returned to visit Iran from Germany, where he recently went through a divorce.
• Elly is Moravid’s kindergarten teacher and has been invited along on the trip.

Sepideh is the vivacious social organizer and energizer of the group.  Without her, as she herself points out early on, the entire Caspian trip wouldn’t have happened.  One of her principal goals for the trip is to match up the now-available Ahmad with the pretty and modestly charming Elly, in the hopes that  romantic developments will ensue.  This match-making quickly becomes an open secret among the entourage, and whenever Elly is out of earshot, they all teasingly encourage Ahmad to make his move.

When they all arrive at the seaside villa, they are informed by the local caretaker that the villa they want is only available for one night and that there are probably no other nearby accommodations during this busy three-day holiday period.  It turns out that Sepideh had known beforehand that only one night was available, but she had not told the others about it, figuring that once they got up to the seaside they could find further accommodation for the other two days. She explains to them her reasoning: if she had told them all beforehand about the villa being available for only one night, she couldn’t have convinced them to set out on the trip in the first place.  In her mind, a little deception was needed to make things happen.  

Sepideh then pleads with the local caretaker woman in private that they really need a nice place, because Elly and Ahmad are on their honeymoon.  This little white lie moves the woman to make an extra effort to accommodate the group, and she arranges for an abandoned villa by the sea to be opened up to them.  But note that Sepideh’s little fibs are not just incidental to the story; indeed they constitute one of the major themes of About Elly – how do we convey the truth to others?  

In this connection I would offer the comment that whenever we are in any group, there is a shared understanding concerning issues of mutual concern.  We point to people and things in the world in front of us and discuss them, hoping that we understand each other, even though we know that we all have our own individual interpretations about these things.  Sometimes, in order to spur cooperative group activity in a certain direction, though, we may exaggerate or even innocently bend the literal truth about something.  This of course can be dangerous.  

The difficulty of conveying exactly what we mean is symbolized early on in the film when the holiday makers have fun playing the game of charades (pantomime game).  In that game the goal is to arrive at a shared meaning; but later on in the story words will be used to mislead – to try to generate separated, distinguished understandings of what has happened.

Anyway, returning to the film story, as the viewer watches the evolving socializing of the various people, he or she is likely to assume that the principal narrative line will be about the emerging relationship of Ahmad and Elly.  But on the second day of their outing (about thirty-five minutes into the film) the story takes a disruptive dramatic turn.  The three little children are playing by the beach, and Elly is asked to watch them while the other adults attend to their various activities and chores.  The viewer doesn’t see exactly what happens in this situation with Elly and the children, but it soon emerges that Arash has wandered out into the sea and is lost, and Elly is not around. There is now a desperate effort by find Arash in the sea and save him from drowning.  The panic-stricken group do just manage to rescue and revive the nearly-drowned Arash, but then the attention of the group turns to Elly.  Where is she?

The rest of the story is concerned with finding out where Elly is and what has happened to her. There are two conjectures. She may have drowned attempting to rescue Arash.  Or she may have abruptly left the group and gone back to Tehran without telling anyone. What makes the second conjecture plausible is that it is known by several group members that Elly had only wanted to stay one night at the seaside villa and then return to her infirm mother back home.  In addition, they wonder if the demure Elly had been offended by the boisterous teasing that had been the social undertone of the interactions on the trip.

Now the finger-pointing begins.  With Elly missing, a police investigation ensues to find out the truth of what happened to her.  What had begun in the film as an exercise in social bonding and harmonizing now dissolves into finding blame and searching for excuses to maintain individual innocence.  As they attempt to discover the truth about Elly, the group uncovers the many little lies that had been accumulating during their time together.  The lies were all understandable within their specific social contexts, but now they are exposed as violations of the truth.

Then the story takes another turn when a phone call to Elly’s home in Tehran uncovers the fact that Elly had a fiancé and that upon hearing news of Elly’s disappearance, the fiancé is now rushing to the Caspian area to investigate.  This discovery adds a further layer of guilt, because the group may now appear to have some moral taint in connection with having arranged an apparent romantic tryst between Ahmad and Elly.  Now the new issue becomes who among the group knew that Elly had a fiancé.  To protect themselves, it seems to some of them that further falsehoods may be necessary.

These three phases of the film thus reflect the shifting social dynamics among the group. 

1. In the first phase of the film, before Elly’s disappearance, the socializing was oriented around finding ways to bond and achieve social harmony.  This involves some minor falsehoods, but the goal was to achieve social unity.
2. The second phase covers the period after Elly’s disappearance and before the appearance of the fiancé.  Here the social dynamics are all involved with selfish concerns.  How can each of them establish his or her own innocence and separation from the group?
3. The third phase, after the arrival of the fiancé, sees the group members reluctantly working together again, this time to arrive at an agreed-upon story to tell the fiancé.

So the story moves from group-thinking –> selfish-thinking –> group thinking as it evolves through the three phases.  As the story progresses, all of the characters, including Elly and her fiancé, participate in deception in one form or another.  Most of these falsehoods, particularly those of Sepideh, were uttered in support of group harmony, not just for selfish reasons.  In fact the biggest liars in the story, Sepideh, Ahmad, Manouchehr, and Naazy, are the most selfless and compassionate.  They exude innocence.  The three characters most closely adhering to the literal truth, Amir, Shohreh, and Peyman, are in fact the most selfish people in the story.

This is what makes About Elly a fascinating tale.  We generally make knee-jerk affirmations about the importance of telling the truth and not lying.  But the story about truth is often more complicated in social situations.   When should one really utter the unvarnished truth?  That is a question that goes back at least as far as Plato’s Dialogues. Indeed the title, “About Elly”, is ironic, since the film is really “About Self” and how the selfish individual relates to a group.  The people in this story are mostly concerned with themselves and have little empathy for Elly [1].  

In About Elly, Farhadi has pulled off a tour de force that cinematically evokes aspects of Michelangelo Antonioni’s work, which also often involves complex ensemble acting performances. Indeed Farhadi remarked in a recent interview that earlier Italian filmmakers had a major influence on his development. Particularly comparable here is Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), which also begins with a group of people on a holiday that is disrupted with the early disappearance of what appeared to have been the major character. But while Antonioni’s focus in L’Avventura eventually centers on two remaining characters, Farhadi accomplished the more difficult feat of maintaining the narrative focus on the entire ensemble throughout About Elly.  It’s interesting that Farhadi manages to maintain the visual coherence of this collective interaction without using as much complicated moving-camera cinematography as was employed by Antonioni.  Unfortunately, Farhadi again resorts to shaky, hand-held camera framing in order to evoke emotional agitation.  To me this technique is distracting and ineffective.  On the other hand, I must admit that the in-the-water close-up cinematography used in the rescue of Arash scenes (how could this be done without agitated framing?) is convincing and very effective.

The acting performances in About Elly are uniformly superb.  Golshifteh Farhanai's performance in the role of Sepideh is particularly compelling, but all the principal characters have distinct personalities and associated social proclivities that are consistently and believably sustained throughout the film.  As the tension mounts during the various crises, each person responds in a way that drives the organic behaviour of the group forward.  This is what makes the ensemble performances work so well and achieve a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Of course, there is a special Iranian flavor to what goes on in About Elly. As you would expect, there is the nuanced social backdrop concerning how men and women behave towards each other, particularly inside a traditional culture such as Iran’s that is also influenced by modernism. But there is also an even more specifically interesting Iranian cultural attitude that should be highlighted in this connection, and that concerns the cultural attitudes about literal truth.  In general, I would say that Iranians have a stronger-than-usual cultural inclination to avoid telling people what they don’t like to hear.  And this can often involve concealing the truth.  This tendency to prevaricate may be culturally reinforced by the Shia Islamic tradition of taqiyya, which sanctions hiding the truth in certain circumstances. The disposition to occasionally mislead is also probably supported by the famed Iranian tradition of social etiquette, known as taarof, which directs people to speak and act with the utmost courtesy.  One might argue about the proper boundaries and limits of such practices, but their sustained existence in Iranian cultural behaviour offers clear evidence that successful social interactions go beyond black-and-white utterances about what is true and what is good for the overall group or society.  In fact many times we don’t know exactly what is true, and mere adherence to a literal, but uncertain, truth about something may not lead to the most “positive” (an admittedly interpretation-dependent term) course of action.  Thus in the final verbal exchange that takes place in About Elly, Sepideh evidently lies one last time.  Was this final lie ultimately a selfish act?  You can reflect on what her reasons may have been for doing this and whether or not you agree with them.
★★★★

Notes:

1. The Farsi word in the title, ‘Dabareyeh’, means ‘concerning’ in English and has been translated as ‘about’ in the English version of the title.  But ‘about’ has additional connotations in English beyond ‘concerning’, including 'around' or 'nearby'.  This injects some extra suggestive meaning into the English form of the ironic title.
    

"A Separation" - Asghar Farhadi (2011)

A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin, 2011) is an intense Iranian domestic drama by writer-director Asghar Farhadi (About Elly, 2009) that has drawn immense critical favor and won multiple awards.  The film opens with a married couple facing directly into the camera and giving testimony concerning their application for a divorce.  At first site, this looks very much like another version of Farhadi’s Fireworks Wednesday (Chaharshanbe Suri, 2006), which told a searing story of a bickering married couple and their inability to fashion a stable marriage relationship.  But A Separation proves to be quite different.  While both halves of the married couple in Fireworks Wednesday were unforgiving and unsympathetic characters, the married couple in A Separation, Nader and Simin, are reasonable and understandable.  We can empathize with each of them and understand why they act as they do.  What distinguishes them from each other, as the ensuing events will demonstrate, is that Nader is the principled idealist, while Simin is the pragmatist. Popular cultural expectations about gender roles often lead us to expect the man to be the pragmatist and the woman to be the principled idealist, but it is just the opposite in this case.

There is another significant aspect of A Separation that distinguishes it from many Iranian films, indeed from most films across the international spectrum, concerning the focus of the domestic interaction.  In many Iranian films, the focus is on the difficulties that women face in a conflicted and changing society that has traditionally placed severe restrictions on them.  In this film, however, the primary focalization and the underlying themes that drive the narrative are centered around the husband, Nader.  

The opening scene quickly and clearly reveals the main aspects of Nader and Simin’s situation. Simin has been working diligently for a year-and-a-half to acquire a visa to some overseas country, where she expects that they can have a better life for themselves and their eleven-year-old daughter, Termeh.  And now, finally, they have been granted the visa and have been given forty days in which to respond, that is, emigrate to their long-sought country abroad.  But Nader, who had originally cooperated with Simin’s efforts to emigrate, now refuses to go – he says he cannot abandon his father, whose Alzheimer’s condition requires round-the-clock care.  Nader is quite willing to allow his wife to leave, but he doesn’t want to hand over custody of Termeh to Simin, and the Islamic law of Iran evidently gives the husband  the authority in this situation.  So Simin and Nader have agreed to go through uncontested divorce proceedings in preparation for a further decision in connection with who will wind up with Termeh.  The magistrate listening to their divorce deposition, however, refuses to grant them a divorce, even though both Simin and Nader are in agreement about that issue.  He says their reasons for seeking a divorce are insufficient for dissolving their marriage.

The viewer can understand and even sympathize with the positions of both Simin and Nader.  Both of them are reasonable and civilized, but they have different outlooks.  Simin is practical and judges the good action by the likely beneficial consequences to come from it.  For Nader, his good actions are determined by his own inner moral compass, which is not governed by externally defined rules or outcomes.  This is exemplified by an exchange between Simin and Nader, when she points out to her husband that his dementia-stricken father at this point doesn’t even know that Nader is his own son.  “But I know him,” Nader responds.

Nader even decides to let Termeh go abroad with Simin if she chooses, but the girl decides to stick by her father at home. Simin moves out of the house, in preparation for her move abroad, and from here on, we follow what goes on at home with Nader and his daughter and father. It’s evident that Nader is a caring and thoughtful man and father, but he is clearly under stress.  He has a full-time job to attend to, his wife has just left him, he has to look after his terminally ailing father, and he must look after Termeh and help her with her schoolwork.  This stress and pressure on Nader will only intensify as the narrative progresses.

Nader proceeds to hire a caretaker woman, Razieh, to look after his father while he is away at work during the day.  Razieh comes from a conservative, lower-class background and is hesitant about the moral implications of being alone at home with another man, even if that man is almost insensate with dementia.  But with her husband unable to find work, she desperately needs the money and goes ahead with the job.

Not long after Razieh starts work, Nader comes home early one day and finds Razieh away from the house and his father half-dead on the floor of his bedroom, with his hands tied to the bedposts.  Razieh had tied the old man up to the bed and had gone out to attend to some other chores. In her absence, the father had fallen out of bed, leaving him in a precarious, immobile position on the floor. Nader manages to revive his father, but he is still very disturbed about Razieh’s neglect. He retains his composure, but his stress level has increased markedly. When Razieh returns to the apartment shortly thereafter, Nader confronts her with what has happened to his father and the fact that some money has been taken from his bureau.  He dismisses Razieh on the spot and orders her out of the house.  Razieh protests her innocence about the missing money and refuses to leave the apartment, so Nader pushes her out the door and locks it.  

The seemingly minor act of pushing Razieh out the door turns out to be a major event and brings woe to everyone.  Nader soon learns that Razieh was pregnant and had a miscarriage.  She charges Nader with assault, because she says she fell down the stairway leading up to his apartment when she was pushed out the door.  Nader expresses his sorrow and sympathy for what happened, but asserts that he is innocent of the assault charge.  Because Razieh was 19-weeks pregnant, Nader learns that he can be charged with murder and be sentenced to prison for up to three years.  A key issue is whether Nader knew that Razieh was pregnant when he pushed her out the door.  If he did, then the law says he is culpable for a murder.  

The rest of the film revolves around unraveling what happened when Nader nudged Razieh out the door.  Did she really fall down the stairs (the viewer doesn’t see it)?  Did the alleged fall cause the miscarriage, or was there some other incident at that time?  Did Nader really know about Razieh’s pregnancy?  We viewers knew, but Nader swears he did not, and we are moved to take Nader at his word.  Little scraps of evidence come out here and there.  All the way along, we are looking to see if Nader will be found guilty of the charge.  We are also judging Nader, ourselves, along with Termeh, according to our own moral compasses.  

A key moment in the story occurs when Termeh confronts Nader with her doubts about whether he knew about Razieh’s pregnancy before the shoving – there are inconsistencies in what Nader testified to the authorities.  With his integrity as a parent on the line, Nader confesses to Termeh that he did know about Razieh’s pregnancy before the act. But he denied knowing to the authorities, because the rigidity of the law doesn’t take into account the fact that at the moment of his nudging her out the door, he was not mindful of her condition. He knew, and yet he didn’t know, he tells Termeh.  According to the letter of the law and according to the strict, conservative moral code followed by Razieh and her husband Hodjiat, Nader is a liar and guilty of a crime.  But Nader tells Termeh that he still believes he is innocent of the crime of murder, but the rigidity of the law compelled him to cover up his foreknowledge of Razieh’s pregnancy.  Termeh is anguished to hear this, but stands loyally behind her father’s testimony when she is interrogated by the authorities.

The pragmatic Simin reenters the situation and tries to come up with a practical solution.  If they are willing to pay a diyya (“blood money”) of 40 million tomans (about US$ 40,000) to Razieh and Hodjiat, Nader can avoid going to jail.  Simin approaches Razieh and Hodjiat and gets them to agree to a payment of 15 million tomans.  If Nader confesses to the crime and pays the blood money, he can avoid going to jail.  But Nader doesn’t go along with this arrangement, because it would entail his admission that he committed murder.  He believes in his own innocence.

The acting in A Separation is very good, particularly that of Peyman Maadi in the role of Nader. Indeed all of the performers, including Leila Hatami (Leila, 1998; Low Heights, 2002), give convincing and subtle performances [1]. On the other hand, the shaky hand-held cinematography in the film is a distraction and an irritation.  Farhadi has chosen to track his players in closeup and medium closeup as they move around the setting.  Such close-in filming requires an extremely steady camera, particularly when the character movement stops and slight movements of what are supposed to be static images are more noticeable.  Unfortunately this kind  of steady image control is not what we get in A Separation. 

As I mentioned above, there are two judgement examinations of Nader’s behaviour going on in parallel in the film: the official legal case conducted by the civil authorities, and our own private assessment. The ingenue Termeh acts as something of a surrogate for our own assessment of Nader: she knows as much as the viewer and also sympathizes with both parents. At the end of the film, the official examination by the civil authorities is resolved, but Farhadi chooses to leave Termeh’s own, personal assessment open.  Termeh is asked at the end of the film to choose between two different ways of looking at the world: that of Simin or that of Nader.  Both of them are more flexible and complex than the strict moral bookkeeping characteristic of conservative societies,  but they have differing outlooks.  I believe I know which one Termeh chooses, do you?
★★★½ 

Notes:

1. An earlier version of this review contained an erroneous mention here of Niki Karimi.