02.02.2012

Normalised duplicity

Yassamine Mather reviews new film A separation, directed by Asghar Farhadi, on general release.

A separation, which has just won the Golden Globe award for the best foreign-language film, successfully depicts the complexities of contemporary Iranian society. Simin, a wife seeking divorce as a member of a lower-middle class family, around which the narrative revolves, does most of the housework, looks after her daughter and her husband’s elderly father, whilst also managing to hold down a full-time job as a teacher. However, her reason for wanting a divorce is more serious. She hopes to leave Iran for the sake of her daughter’s education - a common worry for generations of middle class Iranian mothers - but her husband will not hear of it.

The film was made prior to recent changes to the higher education curriculum of some of the country’s top universities. Imposed by the Islamic regime, these removed many courses popular with female applicants, such as sociology, media studies and journalism, and instigated gender quotas aimed at producing more male university entrants. Simin does not trust Iran’s Islamic education system to provide her daughter with decent opportunities in education. Contrary to what some Iranian critics - who have accused Simin of egoism - have written, she emerges as a determined, selfless heroine.

In preparation for her departure she finds a maid, Razieh, to replace her in the unpaid jobs she performs daily. The film’s depiction of the maid’s working life allows us brief glimpses of working class life in Iran. To reach the central Tehran flat where she works, Razieh has to travel two-three hours each way, to and from her home - probably located in one of the sprawling working class districts of south Tehran. Because her wages are not enough to afford childcare, she brings her small daughter with her every day. Her husband has lost his job - a common plight amongst Iranian workers, not eased by the country’s misogynous culture; he is angry not only because his wife is now the sole breadwinner, but also because she has to take their child to work.

Not surprisingly for a country ruled by clerics for more than 30 years, virtually none of the film’s characters, who hail from various classes and backgrounds, are practising Muslims - a truthful representation of contemporary Iran. Razieh is the only character with any religious beliefs at all. We know this because her job involves caring for and washing Simin’s father-in-law and she is so concerned about this aspect that she phones a cleric for religious guidance. While the viewer can only imagine the surprise of the cleric at the other end of the line at hearing of such innocence in a country where innocence has long been lost, he duly gives his consent to the performance of this duty.

The director, Asghar Farhadi, draws our attention to the fact that everyone in this scenario is a victim of their circumstances. Despite this, he cannot hide the fact that the plight of the worker, his wife, their daughter and their unborn child is far worse than the lower-middle class family they get involved with.

Farhadi is a student of dissident filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who is currently under house arrest, having been sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for “assembly and colluding with the intention of committing crimes against national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic”. Farhadi is therefore influenced by Panahi’s mentor, Abbas Kiarostami, who is famed for his poetic dialogue and documentary-style narratives. However, Farhadi’s films lean towards traditional narrative structures. They have a beginning and an end. He is also a fan of Alfred Hitchcock and critics have admired the Hitchcockian style of the low-budget A separation.

During the first part of the film, middle class western audiences will probably find a lot in common between their own lifestyles and what they see on the screen - until, that is, the story of the maid and her husband, who must seem to them to belong to an entirely different world. In this way A separation reveals the extent of the social and ideological divide between the middle and working classes in Iran.

Critics have praised the delightfully understated performances of the actors - especially Sarina Farhadi, who plays Simin’s 11-year-old daughter. But in a sense, as the film deals with real-life issues in a country where a religious dictatorship has normalised duplicity, there is no need to overact. They are so used to it, after all.

A minority of Iranian exiled directors maintain that all films and plays produced inside Iran are tainted because nothing worthwhile can be achieved under the dictatorship. Ironically, however, the supporters of Iran’s Islamic order claim the film’s success in the west is solely due to its ‘Islamophobic propaganda’: portraying women in Islamic societies as victims. In fact filmmakers such as Farhadi, Panahi and many others have pushed the tolerance of the regime to its limits. Their subtle, often thoughtful approach to the problems of contemporary Iranian society is not just more interesting: it often results in a far superior portrayal of the tortuous lives of its citizens than the ‘political’ films made about Iran by exiles.

Just as A separation was pulling in the plaudits at the January 15 Golden Globe ceremony, the regime was deciding to shut down Tehran’s independent House of Cinema, which it has declared “illegal” - the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance said that it would now assume direct control of the industry. This followed weeks of claims in pro-regime newspapers that the institution - and, by extension, Iranian cinema - was a haven of “low moral standards” .