Rating of
3.5/4
Insight and Realism through the Lens of Film
cacb3995 - wrote on 11/19/17
Asghar Farhadi, last year’s Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award winner for the excellent “The Salesman”, won his first Oscar (and, may we add, the Golden Bear as well) back in 2011 with this wonderfully complex and multilayered social drama, a portrait of a family’s disolution and the ramifications of class conflicts. Nader (Peyman Moaadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) are in the middle of getting divorced. They have a daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), who seems to play a key role in the outcome of her parents’ divorce. Nader’s father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi) suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, so Nader hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat) to take care of him while he is at work. Razieh soon feels overwhelmed by the task, so her unemployed husband Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini) is supposed to take over for her. Things don’t go smoothly as first thought, and both families soon find themselves in an ever escalating conflict that takes a toll in everyone involved, including and specially their respective daughters.
What can be said about this gem of international cinema? There is so much to look into in this film that I don’t even know where to start. Honestly speaking, I hadn’t seen the movie before because I didn’t quite know what to expect, the basic premise (a couple’s divorce) wasn’t that appealing at first. But, now that I finally got around to see it, I can truly say that it was a mistake waiting this long. The reduction of the main plot displayed in the title, a very condensed and summarized version of the events, actually helps create this vagueness and ambiguity in the viewer, what follows is a ride that we’re definitely not prepared for but most certainly is worth it.
Full review at: https://breakingthefourthwallsite.wordpress.com/2017/11/18/a-separation-insight-and-realism-through-the-lens-of-film/
