A Separation (2011)

Director: Asghar Farhadi


It is surprising how many films have their characters painted as exclusively good or exclusively bad. That is why it is so refreshing to see a film like A Separation, one in which all of the characters are complex and can be seen as good and bad simultaneously. The film is an incredibly rich character drama that starts off with a divorce, but one that only unravels further after that and ends up being one of the most morally complex films I have seen in years.


Every character in this film has a moral dilemma that is instigated because of their situation, which includes where they live or how much money they have. Every adult character can potentially grab your sympathies, because even though some of these characters lie, the reasons they do so are spelled out very clearly. The husband and wife at the center of the eponymous separation both struggle with the conflict between compromising principles for practical benefits and standing behind your principles at all costs. It would have been very easy to make one of these characters the bad guy, but Farhadi does an incredible job at making sure everyone has an understandable point. Because the film is so moralistic, it is very likely you will end up sympathizing with one character more because of your own morals, but in that way the movie makes the audience examine their own morals.


As the film goes on though, there are a couple characters that start to come to the forefront as pure characters, and those are the children. Children are innocent and pure, and in these adult conflicts they are always the one who end up being the collateral damage. I have yet to see a film that gets across how it is always the children that lose in divorces. A Separation reveals the many battles human beings have with and within themselves and the real world consequences of those battles.


Grade: A