Habib Madjidi/Sony Pictures Classics
Leila Hatami in "A Separation."
Traveling around North America and Europe this year for festival showings of their new movie, “A Separation,” the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi and his cast have noticed a pattern. Audiences arrive skeptical, anticipating something exotic and unfamiliar, and leave pleasantly surprised that they understand and can identify with the film’s characters.
“At a lot of these festivals, they tell me afterward that they were expecting deserts and camels” and “thinking that women in our country are not allowed even to drive, much less ask for a divorce,” said Peyman Moaadi, who plays the male lead. “But Asghar is showing a new image of Iran, portraying the way that millions of normal people live in Iran today.”
“A Separation,” which opens on Dec. 30 with a limited Oscar-qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles, begins as a domestic drama, with a middle-class couple in Tehran unable to resolve their disagreement over where and how they should live. She wants to leave Iran so that their daughter can have a better life, but he feels obliged to remain so that he can care for his father, who has Alzheimer’s.
When she leaves him and the daughter to return to her parents’ house, complications of all kinds — legal, moral and religious — ensue. The new presence of a pious, pregnant lower-class housekeeper working without her husband’s knowledge proves disruptive, and gradually the film turns into both a meditation on the nature of truth and honesty — when, if ever, is it acceptable to lie? — and a Rashomon-like mystery to be unraveled.
“This is a film in which the audience is the detective,” Mr. Farhadi, 39, said in an interview at a Manhattan hotel just before “A Separation” was shown at the New York Film Festival in the fall. “It’s the audience that is in charge of solving the puzzles and asking and answering questions.”
Initial responses to Mr. Farhadi’s film have been extremely positive, making it an early front-runner in speculation about the Academy Award for best foreign-language film. “A Separation” won four of the main prizes at the Berlin Film Festival in February, for example, and this month critics in Los Angeles voted its screenplay the best of the year, while their colleagues in New York selected it as the best foreign-language film of 2011.
In Iran “A Separation” has broken box-office records and been widely pirated as a DVD. Khatereh Sheibani, author of “The Poetics of Iranian Cinema: Aesthetics, Modernity and Film After the Revolution” and a professor of Persian literature and culture at York University in Toronto, attributes the success of what is at heart an art-house film to the movie’s subject matter and its target audience.
“Most Iranian filmgoers live in an urban setting and have been disappointed” by a tendency of filmmakers there to focus mostly on poor and rural Iran, she said. “But they could see their own issues and problems being projected in this film, including the question of leaving or staying” under the Islamic theocracy that rules the country’s 70 million people.
In addition, “You see the clash of modernity and tradition in this film,” she said. While foreigners “might see Iran as one culture, to us it consists of many different ideologies, worldviews and cultures.”
Mr. Farhadi denied that the film had any broader political significance, saying that it is less a story about Iran than about a couple and “human problems and conditions and the difficulties of relationships between people.”
“As Ingmar Bergman used to say, messages are for the telegraph office,” he added, speaking in Farsi through an interpreter. “There’s a difference between intentions and message. My intention was to create a story and let you interpret what it means. To me, that is more effective filmmaking than to just give a manifesto or slogans.”
That may well be. But the Iranian diaspora has detected all kinds of subtle critical references to the country’s situation, and Mr. Farhadi has previously run afoul of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance: In 2010 authorization to shoot “A Separation” was temporarily suspended after he made public statements supporting two filmmakers, one exiled and the other jailed.
Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=40faefce132028b7669262f933e1796c
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