Simin (Leila Hatami), a teacher, is desperate to leave Iran with her husband Nader (Peyman Moaadi) and their eleven-year-old daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, the writer-director Asghar Farhadi's own daughter) in order for Termeh to have a better life abroad. Nader, however, is torn between participating in this desire, as he also wants more chances for his daughter, and remaining in Iran where he is looking after his elderly father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi), who's battling Alzheimer's disease. This conflict of loyalties and wishes throws their marriage quickly on the rocks, which increases once Nader hires working-class wife and mother Razieh (Sareh Bayat) to be his dad's caregiver. Now, with Razieh's own unstable family life tossed into the mix and Nader accused of a crime, any chances of this being an amicable divorce are extinguished.
A Separation won the 2011 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and Golden Globe and the Berlin Film Festival Golden Bear, but I must say I don't understand why. Let me be clear and say I knew beforehand this was no fast-paced action movie, and for about the first 30 minutes it did have me engaged, but after that I found it increasingly monotonous and even predictable. It has one intimate argument scene after another (with one near the end I almost found unintentionally funny, it was so over-the-top) and I also felt Farhadi overlooked a chance here to specifically examine the confines marriage and legal systems place on women particularly in the Middle East. A little political commentary like that would've made the narrative more powerful and unorthodox, I think. Or maybe it was there, and I just missed it; in which case, it should've been more pointed.
A Separation is an intimate, personal film, and many of those are great. But for me, telling an intimate story doesn't mean you should make it constantly repetitive.
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