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Film Review: A Separation

Don't be put off by a man with Alzheimers soiling himself. Olly Mann describes how, after a slow, start, he became 'gripped'. And he maintained a clean set of nick-nacks.

By Olly Mann

30 Jun 2011, 11:13

Here’s what I was thinking, watching the first thirty minutes of A Separation: have I made a terrible mistake? I’d told Iain I wanted to review arty and intelligent films for his new website, primarily because I thought I could blag some tickets to screenings. And here I was, ticket blagged, free beer blagged, sitting back in a comfortable Soho screening room, watching… an old man with Alzheimer's soil himself. Not everyone’s idea of a top night out.

I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge (although, it must be said, that first half an hour is S-L-O-W). Writer-Director Asghar Farhadi takes his time building up a picture of a family going through a separation in contemporary, middle-class Iran, but he has his reasons. Here, we learn, divorce is still a dirty word, women can only be hired with their husband’s permission, and fear of God pervades daily duties (is it a sin, a housekeeper asks, to assist a man with dementia if that means seeing him in the nude?) There’s no soundtrack, and very little light relief, but over that first thirty minutes the apartment in which most of the drama unfolds begins to feel very real, as do the principal performances of Peyman Moadi and Sereh Bayat, the stand-out members of an ensemble who deservedly won the Silver Berlin Bear this year.

Then, suddenly, an Event happens; the kind of Event that usually happens in the cliffhanger of a soap opera, but, because the environment of the drama feels so authentic, doesn’t feel contrived. And all the context we’ve acquired in that first thirty minutes, right down to the floorplan of the apartment of itself, suddenly becomes relevant, as the Event is raked over in a series of sitting rooms and class-rooms, hospital waiting-rooms and police stations, and, foggiest of all, in court. The nuances and vagueries of perception and motivation become plot points in themselves, and we begin to question whose side we’re on, what we’ve seen, and how our own prejudices influence our conclusions. It’s not an explicitly political film – Farhardi doesn’t pass judgement on the Sharia law governing his (mostly secular) characters - but it’s hard not to come out feeling that their legal system is as flawed as the characters themselves. By the end, I was gripped.

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