A SEPARATION written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, with Peyman Moadi, Leila Hatami, Sareh Bayat, Shahab Hosseini and Sarina Farhadi. 123 minutes. Subtitled. A Mongrel release. Opens Friday (January 20). For venues and times, see Movies.
Asghar Farhadi is a clever man. You’d have to be to direct a movie like A Separation, which won three awards at the Berlin Film Festival and earlier this week took home the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film. Next month it could do the same at the Oscars.
“I really didn’t think it would have much of a reception outside Iran,” said the director, during the 2011 Toronto Film Festival. “It was only after Berlin, where the critics talked about it a lot, that I realized it could.”
I’m not sure if this is false modesty. Farhadi speaks through an interpreter, and his answers are hard to gauge. Like the film itself, he’s selective about if, how and when he reveals information.
The movie opens with middle-class couple Nader and Simin (Peyman Moadi and Leila Hatami) seeking a divorce because she wants their daughter (Sarina Farhadi) to live in a culture that offers more opportunities. Nader doesn’t want to leave his father, who’s got Alzheimer’s, so Simin moves in with her parents after hiring a woman (Sareh Bayat) to look after the old man during the day. Soon, something happens that changes all their lives and makes them confront big moral decisions.
What Simin doesn’t like about Iranian society isn’t spelled out in the film, and I ask Farhadi about that.
“I think the whole film is the answer to this question,” he says enigmatically. “If there were such an easy answer, it would have been there in the very first scene.”
Farhadi is careful about how he answers a question about Jafar Panahi, the imprisoned Iranian director currently in jail and facing a 20-year ban on making or directing movies, leaving the country or conducting any interviews.
Does he feel the pressure of censorship?
“My mind usually goes toward things that I know something about,” he says. “I can’t write about sex [for instance], because I don’t know much about it.”
He says he understands the Panahi issue because he was born, raised and continues to live in Iran.
“For me, it’s easier to understand all these issues and write from there. If a Canadian filmmaker wants to go to Iran and make a film about these issues, it would obviously be hard. Limitations are part of our lives in Iran. That doesn’t mean they’re accepted. But that fight has been part of our lives.”
He’s more comfortable talking about the casting of the crucial role of the couple’s daughter.
One of the film’s chief joys comes from the banter between the film’s stubborn Nader and his gifted pre-adolescent child. Farhadi says he had similar conversations with his own daughter when he would drive her to and from school.
“We’d talk about many serious things,” he says. “Then I just thought: maybe this relationship can be reflected in one of my films.”
When it came time to cast A Separation, he realized that the best person to play the character would, in fact, be his daughter, who shared the best-actress prize at Berlin with the film’s other women.
“It was difficult for her to realize that she was no longer my daughter but was playing the part of someone else’s daughter,” he says. “But I let her spend a lot of time with Moadi. I wanted them to feel closer, to make it more natural.”
The film contains many realistic scenes involving judges and conflicting testimony.
“But I think the kids in this film,” says Farhadi tellingly, “are the best judges in the film.”
glenns@nowtoronto.com
