Winner of the Golden Bear at Berlin earlier this year, A Separation is a remarkably poised marital thriller from Iran, full of surprise developments and suppressed volatility. It opens with a youngish couple airing their grievances to an off-screen lawyer. In effect they're appealing straight to camera, to us, the audience: we shall be their judge.
The wife Simin (Leila Hatami) wants to leave the country with the couple's 11-year-old daughter. The husband Nader (Peyman Moadi) will not grant her the divorce or permission she needs, nor will the judge, who considers their case to be petty. Privately, they later agree to separate, their daughter Termeh remaining with the husband in their pleasant apartment in what we assume is an enlightened, middle-class quarter of Tehran. Because the husband's father has Alzheimer's, the family hire a carer called Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a woman they scarcely know, from a poorer part of the city, and who, we later discover, is pregnant.
When an argument over the level of care seems to cause Razieh to miscarry, all parties become suffocated in a legal case. The film develops into a complex moral dilemma that pitches religion against economics, one that brilliantly, and with creeping tension, encapsulates the tussles and fissures in Iranian society.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jul/03/a-separation-asghar-farhadi-review
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