Much like South Korea, Iran’s film industry holds to a standard of quality that is all out of proportion to the country’s size or nominal cultural influence. Sadly this is the first Iranian film to be covered in this blog though hopefully it will soon be followed by many more. This one, directed by internationally acclaimed director Asghar Farhadi, has won a frankly insane number of awards, including an Oscar. Not bad for a film from an Axis of Evil country.

A Separation tells a complex, multi-layered story of a middle-class couple in Tehran who are divorcing. After a marriage of 14 years, the wife Simin wants their family to move overseas in search of better prospects for their 11-year-old daughter Termeh. Nader prefers to stay in Iran, partly because he has to take care of his ailing father who has Alzheimer’s. When Simin moves back to her parents’ house, Nader hires a maid Razieh from a working-class family to help take care of his father. But Razieh’s family have problems of their own such that she has more responsibilities than she can handle. One day after Nader discovers that Razieh has neglected his father to run her own errands and angrily pushes her out of his house. Tragically it turns out that Razieh was pregnant and suffers a miscarriage, setting up a messy clash between the two families.

The storytelling is nothing short of masterful. Despite the lack of any exposition whatsoever and the density of the plot, you never feel confused about what’s going on. Each character has a rich, distinct and realistic set of motivations that Farhadi who also produced and wrote this film could have created only from having an impressive grasp of both human psychology and the complexities of modern society in Iran. There are so many elements and so many overlapping themes: senescence, conflict between religious rules and the practicalities of everyday life, depression, men who stubbornly hold to principles out of pride, children who understand more than their parents admit etc. that it seems impossible to fit them all in one film, yet Farhadi not only manages it but does so with such seamless ease that it leaves behind just about every other modern drama in the dust.

One of my favorite bits about this film is that while there’s no ambiguity in how the story unfurls, there is plenty of moral ambiguity in every decision. Nader for example tries to lessen his guilt by arguing that he had no idea that Razieh was pregnant and that he wouldn’t have hired her if he had known in the first place. When his daughter Termeh confronts him about it, he is eventually forced to concede that he had known from overhearing a conversation but he had temporarily forgotten it in his anger. Later the police question Termeh and without being coached by her father she in turns lies to protect her father so that he can stay out of prison. Effectively we know each wrong thing done by each of the characters but because we also understand why they did it, it’s hard to condemn anyone for it.

This is also the reason why even though it deals with many controversial issues, the film never comes across as being moralistic or judgmental. This is a marked contrast with many Hollywood dramas that try too hard to drive home a message and thereby loses authenticity. Paul Haggis’ Crash, a film about gender issues and racism in Los Angeles, immediately comes to mind as a prime example. Life is just too varied and too complex to be reduced to a set of rules. In accurately portraying this unpredictable complexity in a more or less neutral manner, A Separation manages, over and over again, to surprise us and to move us.

When reviewing this, Roger Ebert wrote of his conviction that A Separation is so good that it would be remembered and watched even decades from now as one of the best dramas ever made. Time will tell whether or not he is right but to me this certainly qualifies as a modern masterpiece.