Asghar Farhadi at once places
A Separation within Iranian social critique and moves far beyond it from the first static two shot that follows the credits sequence. Nader (Peyman Moaadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) talk to a judge about getting a divorce, and the official's refusal to grant it reminds Western audiences of the religious hold still in effect on nations like Iran. Even the nature of the marital dispute invokes the country's strict social regulations, with the rift coming from Nader's desire to stay in the land Simin so desperately wants to leave. But the shot never leaves the couple, never shows the symbol of governmental oppression who will not grant their request. Soon the two seem to stop noticing the third party altogether, bickering with each other and only turning to the befuddled judge to ask for his support, not in any legally binding sense but in the manner someone asks a friend to agree with a minor dispute. Within minutes Farhadi firmly repositions the film's focus from a potential social commentary to a complex human drama that, like the husband and wife do the judge, demands the audience pick a side, only to make every set of choices too passionately argued to make a decision easy, if at all possible.
Farhadi wastes no time setting up intractable feuds. Simin's desire to raise her daughter outside Iran's constrictive theocracy naturally earns sympathy from this secular viewer, but she callously disregards Nader's reason for wanting to stay, namely, his Alzheimer's-stricken father who needs his son's care. This is but the first of the film's many quandaries of responsibility and ethical obligation: Simin has grown weary of caring for her father-in-law and feels no inherent accountability for the man, while Nader could not live with himself if he shuffled off the onus of caregiving to a stranger and left. Who's wrong here? Not even a judge can say, and when the couple returns home, Simin decides to cut off the whole argument by moving back in with her parents, leaving Nader and their pubescent daughter Termeh to fend for themselves.
