Salon.com > A Separation

First look: An Iranian director takes on Western morality

Sat, 18 May 2013 13:25:00 +0000

CANNES, France -- By leaving his native Iran (at least for now) and making what for all practical purposes is a French film, Oscar-winning director Asghar Farhadi may have given up the principal factor that made him interesting to the West. But those who admired Farhadi’s intense Tehran domestic drama “A Separation” – one of the key movies of this decade so far – will find the same intimate sensibility and the same finely-wrought shifts in perspective at work in “The Past,” which premiered here on Friday. It's still too early at Cannes to start handicapping the Palme d'Or race, but this one's sure to be a strong contender.

This time Farhadi's camera is pointed not at the hypocrisies of life in the Islamic Republic but at the darker consequenes of easy-breezy serial monogamy in the secular West. It’s oddly bracing to have an artist come out of a society that we know he finds overly repressive, and immediately make a film that essentially accuses supposedly liberated Westerners of behaving like a bunch of spoiled children, and of poisoning the next generation with our reckless misbehavior. Mind you, “The Past” is a complex drama that can’t be boiled down to that one theme, and anyway the squabbling middle-class couple in “A Separation” inflicted plenty of damage on that adorably precocious preteen daughter of theirs. It’s not as if Farhadi is preaching either morality or religion. Islam played a role in “A Separation” mainly as a marker of class differentiation, and while several of the characters in “The Past” come from Muslim backgrounds, religion is never mentioned.

A Hollywood party, with a nervous look to Iran

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 19:30:00 +0000

The 405, Los Angeles’ leading freeway, is under construction. Lanes suddenly close and then merge haphazardly into the one nuzzled next to it. Center dividers inch closer and closer into carpool lanes. And drivers – which in a city of waitresses, actresses and waitresses longing to be actresses, might be the most infamous population of all -- drive erratically as a result. The drivers are erratic because the road has become erratic; the road has become erratic because the city is erratic.

But for Payman Maadi, the star of "A Separation," it feels a little like home. Los Angeles, he says, is in many ways just like Tehran. He's here for the Academy Awards, which are quintessentially Los Angeles. But Tehran, of course, is nothing like the Academy Awards; the transitive property does not apply here.

So when I see Maadi dead asleep in the passenger seat just before the Oscars, I see the exhausting wear of Los Angeles -- the city takes an unsuspected toll on an Iranian who runs a luxury watch shop in the country’s capital, and now finds himself in the throes of the movie industry’s biggest night.

Pick of the week: Dazzling Iranian drama “A Separation”

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 01:00:00 +0000

There are no explicit politics in Iranian director Asghar Farhadi's remarkable film "A Separation," and while Farhadi struggled with government authorities while making the movie, he has since received the Islamic Republic's seal of approval. "A Separation" opened the government-sponsored Fajr International Film Festival in Tehran earlier in 2011 and is now the official Iranian foreign-language Academy Award candidate. That suggests two conclusions that sound contradictory but may both be true: Maybe the Iranian cultural authorities aren't all that bright, and maybe the level of dissent and discourse inside Iran is more sophisticated than most outsiders imagine.