A Separation,”Separation of Nader from Simin”, Review.

 

A Separation by Asghar Farhadi, has won a Bafta award and is now nominated for Best Foreign Film Oscar.

The Guardian said that the Iranian film goes beyond class and gender.

It is, by contrast, a picture that stays with class and gender. Its taut narrative develops them  within a generous humanism. A Separation also opens our eyes to some significant  religious and cultural issues in Iranian society.

Nader and Simin are a couple with a daughter, Termeh. They live in a flat in Tehran. The family is, in European terms, middle  middle class. Nadar works in a Bank. His wife, Simin, is a University teacher.

Simin want to leave Iran. While we are not shown exactly why. But there some clear indications that neither of the couple are happy with  Official Iranian culture.  In the kitchen there is a tin of Twinnings Earl Grey. Nader  uses ‘merci’ for thank you (widespread  in Farsi until the Khomeinist regime). Simin wears attractive  coloured headscarves. There is a Table Football.  Nader corrects his daughter’s teacher use of an arabic-based word to translate ‘guarantee’, offering a Farsi one. All the signs are that the couple do not support the dour Iranian regime.

But Nader does not want to leave. He wishes to keep looking after for his elderly father, who lives with the family and suffers from Alzheimer’s. Simin files for divorce when he refuses to go with her. The daughter, stays, a choice, we learn, she makes in the  hope of bringing the couple back together. The Family Court rules that the divorce cannot proceed until things are clearer. Termeh stays in the flat when her mother moves back to her parents.

The drama centres around  Razieh, a pregnant, pious woman from woman from the outskirts of Tehran. She is employed to look after the father. She arrives with her joyful small girl in tow.  When the carer  is faced with  the elderly father soiling himself  she phones up her spiritual guide to learn whether it is permitted to clean him. Razieh is rapidly exhausted by this work, and recommends that Nadar approaches her husband for the carer job.

The crisis comes when she has left the flat, for an appointment (we later learn – with a gynecologist), with her small daughter. The father is tied to his bed. He looks at death’s door. Nadar comes back, sess this,  and is furious. Meeting a returning  Raizeh he  accuses her of this, and of stealing money. He pushes her out. She falls.

This is not the end of his problems. He learns that she has been taken to hospital. He meets her husband Houjat, and finds that she has had a miscarriage. He blames Nadar for pushing her down the stairs. Nadar is accused of killing the unborn child.

Shots of the Iranian legal process seems like organised chaos. The Court Official in charge conducts his interrogations in a crowded police station. Nadar is put in prison. The husband threatens him and his family, apparently without serious restraint. There is the menace that Nadar is not a ‘real’ believer.

The picture of the  law’s attempt to unravel the truth sometimes  look like the efforts of French Examining Magistrates. Sometimes succesful, other moments not at all.  The stair pushing looks a less than likely cause of the still birth. Different explanations for the death emerge. There are no independent controls. Indeed there is no lawyer. There is, however, the presumption of innocence. The hope would be, one assumes, that as in the French system, the truth will emerge under rigorous investigation.

The film’s frame draws the viewer deeply into the plot. Minimalist and sparse is appears documentary without being didactic. The middle class drive effortlessly  around the city, while Raizeh is trapped in weary bus journeys. The characters vibrant and at the kind of point where their culture crosses European’s to be both sympathetic and bewildering. It’s not the people but the depth of the cultural rules and the law which lie just outside one’s grasp.

The final scenes  revolve around ‘blood money’ . The case does not go further to the formal Court.  Payments for deaths rather than punishment, are acceptable, (if the injured family party agrees) under Sharia Law. Houjat’s lack of money helps him take this path.

But the Wergeld (as the Anglo-Saxons called it) does not get paid. How and why is the pivot of the film.

It ends with the daughter Termeh’s final choice yet unannounced to her parents.

A Separation well deserves its successes. (More  here.)

 

*******

No war on Iran! For regime change from below!

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