A Separation

SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL: Tehran-based director Asghar Farhadi’s drama, concerning a bitter feud between two Iranian families triggered by a marital separation, has been picked as the winner of the 2011 Sydney Film Festival competition by a jury headed by China’s Chen Kaige. It is a credible decision. This is a powerful film, though of the handful of competition films I saw, the courageous Egyptian film Cairo 678 about women fighting sexual assault (which received the jury’s runner-up special mention) or Miranda July’s delightfully kooky The Future would have made equally creditable winners.

While sharing something of the austerity common to that country’s art cinema – viz. its lack of a music soundtrack – A Separation feels quite different to many of the films we see from Iran on SBS and World Movies and on the festival circuit. Against the formal framing and considered pacing of many Iranian films is a more down-and-dirty aesthetic, with restless handheld camera frequently following the characters as they move from room to room. (Though this verité -style technique is far from unique – see Offside, Jafar Panahi’s film on female soccer fans trying to sneak into a game from which they are banned, which screened in one of the festival’s retrospective sidebars.)

From the moment it starts, with a married couple bursting into an intense argument in front of the government official to whom the wife is appealing for a divorce, the film is fiery, its characters rarely settled for long before erupting into angry opinionation. On one level the film examines the process of divorce – in this case, the wife, Simin (Leila Hatami), wants to live overseas, her husband, Nader (Peyman Moaadi), wants to stay home to look after his Alzheimer's-afflicted father, who shares their relatively spacious flat.

On another level it explores the difficulty of discovering the truth in a judicial system when there is no real evidence other than “he said, she said.” The “she” in this case is not the wife, but Razieh (Sareh Bayat), hired to come to the house to look after her working husband’s father during the day, now that Simin has moved out to stay with her parents. (The magistrate ruled out divorce but separation is legal.)

When Nader returns home to find Razieh has gone out leaving his father to collapse and hurt himself while strapped to his bed, his temper goes off. He also accuses the helper of stealing, and in a rowdy altercation throws her out of the flat. Cue the helper’s incensed husband later turning up to accuse him of murder – Razieh had been pregnant and miscarried after Nader allegedly directly pushed her over on the stairs.

Farhadi keeps ratcheting up the arguments, with the police now involved and Nader potentially facing a gaol term for murdering the unborn child. What holds the viewer, apart from Farhadi’s inherent understanding of the mechanics of drama, is his use of narrative ambiguity and deliberate omission of key information. This puts the audience in a slightly stronger position than the police but not that much more. Is one of the parties lying and which one – or are they both gilding the lily? Eventually we find out.

The film touches on class (the carer is desperate to earn money, her husband being in severe debt) and the law but also the dilemmas of aged care. But all this would be academic if the performances were not so convincing, the drama so intense. Sometimes a little too much so. Only half way through I felt utterly exhausted by all the haranguing.