“A Separation”: Urgent, Involving
My favorite film so far at the New York Film Festival media screenings has been Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation,” a remarkably tense, complex story about issues of truth and justice told through a conflict between two Iranian families. The story: Nader (Peyman Moaadi, pictured) is a decent man but a stubborn one, and he neglects his wife, Simin (Leila Hatami). Too proud to ask her to stay with him, he lets her move back to her mother’s place while he and their 11-year-old daughter are left to look after his aged father with Alzheimer’s disease. He hastily hires a poor woman named Razieh (Sareh Bayat) as a daytime caretaker, who signs on without telling him she’s pregnant (or does she?). A few days later he fires her and shoves her out the door; she falls on the stairs (perhaps) and has a miscarriage. The rest of the film is a crescendo of tension as Razieh’s hot-headed, debt-ridden husband Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini) takes Nader to court for manslaughter. The story’s complications are deftly handled, and the cast is uniformly superb. Sony Pictures Classics will release the film at the end of December.
