“A Separation” is a 2011 Iranian movie that has won the Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film and rightly so. I absolutely loved watching this movie. It is probably one of the best movies I have seen in a long, long time. It had me gripped from start to end; and as far as this project goes, I could not have chosen a better movie.
One of the requirements for when I choose movies (apart from ease of availability) is that it should have some elements of culture and history of the country that it is from. That’s why I saw Cronica de Una Fuega from Argentina instead of The Secret In Their Eyes (which I have been told by multiple people is a fantastic film). In that respect, A Separation was an insurmountable delight. Part of growing up in India and consuming a lot of Indian and Western pop culture content is that unknowingly you make assumptions about countries that are not shown as much in these media and you conjure up very stereotypical pictures of cultures in your head. These movies are a window into my own ignorance in that as they have shattered many a expectation I have had of countries and cultures and do sincerely hope continue to do so. For example, I had always imagined Egypt as only a desert with pyramids in the horizon and sand-storms brewing just out of sight in the corner of your eyes (obviously coloured by way too many rewatchings of The Mummy and its sequel). I almost felt like a fool when the Egyptian movie I saw showed flashy sports cars whizzing by on concrete-paved super-highways and suburban homes.
Something similar happened with Iran.
Theoretically I knew that this was Iran not too long ago …
… until the US and religious zealots trashed it (see: Iran’s regime joins campaign against actress who posted images without wearing a hijab) but still in my head I had always imagined Iran as being a very scary & violent, backwards, medieval-era-technology-filled society. Not all of those impressions were washed away with this movie but I had a lot more nuance at my disposal. It appeared from the movie that while a reasonable chunk of the country and society is still at peace and accepting of the theocracy, that hasn’t translated to them running around in a desert with camel carts and scimitars trading slaves and there are people there fighting the good fight. As Roger Ebert writes in his review of the movie, “The movie takes place in present-day Iran, a modern nation that attempts to live under Islamic law” and that I think personally was an important lesson I learnt — there are people in Iran, just like here in India and everywhere else, that are trying to live modern lives circumscribed by whatever societal norms they were born in to. And I believe just that specific acknowledgement has made me grow as a person.
Again, theoretically, given all the recent hullabaloo going on in India regarding Islamic divorce, I knew that divorce is expressly permitted in Islam, but growing up in a Hindu-majority country where even the judges denies consenting amicable adults to void a legal contract by ordering you to work it out, I was taken by surprise a little that divorce is considered quite normal and taken quite in stride in the Iranian society. It might be lopsided but it still seems more ‘normal’ there than it does in India. At the same time it was heartening to see that in the case of institutionalized dowry we are much further ahead.
The film functions as a character study (the dad making sure his daughter learns to be independent in the face of the disapproving stares of the general society), a cultural study (the help calling up her imam to make sure that helping a naked old incapacitated man wouldn’t be a sin), a moral ethics study (spoilers: the culpability in the accidental killing of an unborn child) and also a mystery thriller while all the time telling a simple story of a husband and wife and their child dealing with the consequences of an impending divorce. That’s a lot for one movie to attempt to do and it does so brilliantly.
The entire movie surreptitiously builds up to a spellbinding final scene that kept me engrossed throughout the end credits even though nothing happens, and actually made me happy that nothing happened (unlike those pesky Marvel movies).
This is some classy movie-making. Go check it out now.
