#a separation

Asghar Farhadi’s “جدایی نادر از سیمین” (A Separation) March 16, 2011.

The title in Persian of A Separation translates as The Separation of Nader and Simin, but the film is about more separations than just that of the husband and wife played by Peyman Moaadi and Leila Hatami. It’s about the separations between parents and children, between the middle class and the laboring class, between the devout and the worldly, and between the judicial system and those it supposedly serves. And for American audiences it also serves as a reminder of the separation between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The movie was the first Iranian film to win the best foreign language film Oscar, and Farhadi’s stunning script was also nominated for the best original screenplay Oscar. (It lost to Woody Allen’s screenplay for Midnight in Paris.)  The human problems in A Separation resemble those in another film about citizens caught in the inscrutable workings of their judicial system. Like the Russians in Leviathan (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2014), the two Iranian families locked in conflict in Farhadi’s film must cope with the seeming indifference of the judges to their complicated problems. I was feeling complacent about the American justice system until I watched a news segment on the horrific abuses of the public defender system which, especially if you happen to be poor and Black, is every bit as cruelly broken as the corrupt Russian courts and the hidebound Iranian ones.

A Separation (2011) Asghar Farhadi

A Separation (2011) dir. Asghar Farhadi

Oh I think we just erased her from existence