December 30, 2011 [A Separation]
A Separation codes its social issues as personal
problems. The wife says she cannot live in Iran any more; her reasons are not
explicit. They have a young teenaged daughter, and the wife won't leave Iran
unless the daughter goes with her. The girl won't leave her father and
grandfather, who suffers from Alzheimer's, and so the wife stays in Iran, while
her work visa nears its expiration date.
Inevitable Iranian complications ensue. The husband needs a caretaker for his father, hires a woman who's pregnant. She has difficulties with the father—there's a scene in which he soils himself and she needs to call a religious authority to see if it's permissible to touch him—and she ties the father to his bed while she leaves for long-undisclosed (but tragic) reasons—which sets off her own husband, who is desperately anxious and disappointed, so quick to violent anger. The daughter, bookish and sweet, is naturally conflicted and miserable—and the husband grows frantic trying to juggle everyone's needs and issues, not the least his own.
And that's only the barest sketch of the plot. This could be one heckuva Lifetime movie, it's so full of incident and anguish. It generates a deep commitment to keep watching, a real instance of I-wanna-see-how-it-turns-out. And you know, forget Lifetime; this would've been at home in the 1950s, somewhere in the vicinity of Douglas Sirk; even with its ground-level film style, the camera close, bumping into the characters, handheld and intimate—or pulling back out of respect for their privacy—A Separation echoes those opulent Technicolor weepers in which hysteria and panic seem the response of choice—and rightly so, the lives they lead are so hectically unhappy.
My friend Jim, whose education as an historian allows him to grasp the Big Picture quickly, is fond of saying that, if you want to rejuvenate an American neighborhood, fill it with refugees from totalitarian states. Well, A Separation doesn't emigrate anyone, but it shows me once more that Iran's dour politics create what Scorsese calls "smugglers": filmmakers who cannot always say what they think, but can show us what it means. Iran's rich film culture, then, may depend on the restrictions of its politics. Not to be flippant, but there's an old truism that the real test of a comedian's talents is to work clean. They are censored, but that censorship becomes an opportunity to look more deeply into the things everyone sees, and to show it back to them more clearly. In the case of A Separation, it's sad because it's true.
Inevitable Iranian complications ensue. The husband needs a caretaker for his father, hires a woman who's pregnant. She has difficulties with the father—there's a scene in which he soils himself and she needs to call a religious authority to see if it's permissible to touch him—and she ties the father to his bed while she leaves for long-undisclosed (but tragic) reasons—which sets off her own husband, who is desperately anxious and disappointed, so quick to violent anger. The daughter, bookish and sweet, is naturally conflicted and miserable—and the husband grows frantic trying to juggle everyone's needs and issues, not the least his own.
And that's only the barest sketch of the plot. This could be one heckuva Lifetime movie, it's so full of incident and anguish. It generates a deep commitment to keep watching, a real instance of I-wanna-see-how-it-turns-out. And you know, forget Lifetime; this would've been at home in the 1950s, somewhere in the vicinity of Douglas Sirk; even with its ground-level film style, the camera close, bumping into the characters, handheld and intimate—or pulling back out of respect for their privacy—A Separation echoes those opulent Technicolor weepers in which hysteria and panic seem the response of choice—and rightly so, the lives they lead are so hectically unhappy.
My friend Jim, whose education as an historian allows him to grasp the Big Picture quickly, is fond of saying that, if you want to rejuvenate an American neighborhood, fill it with refugees from totalitarian states. Well, A Separation doesn't emigrate anyone, but it shows me once more that Iran's dour politics create what Scorsese calls "smugglers": filmmakers who cannot always say what they think, but can show us what it means. Iran's rich film culture, then, may depend on the restrictions of its politics. Not to be flippant, but there's an old truism that the real test of a comedian's talents is to work clean. They are censored, but that censorship becomes an opportunity to look more deeply into the things everyone sees, and to show it back to them more clearly. In the case of A Separation, it's sad because it's true.
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