I saw The Separation last night. It's an Iranian film worth every award its got. Just a knock out. Everything about it is good work. The tension is unrelieved as two families dig themselves deeper and deeper into a mire of conflict as the lies and truths flow back and forth with and against some future fate that just can not seem to end.
It's beyond law or justice or fairness. In one scene you can watch the judge hold his head in one hand and dip a sugar cube in his tea and suck on it, meditating on the dilemma of what to do when everybody is telling the truth and lying about something.
The ending is just about as good as it gets. The near freeze is immaculate, which is the sickening dread of waiting for a decision that will never come.
Honor, pride, obligations, responsibilities, loyalities interweave with families, classes, law, ethics, religion, social structures as the characters struggle to do right and try to survive, while accident, circumstance, mistakes that can't be taken back work through the film like a stain that spreads ... there is no way out.
I know it is not `in' the movie, but the profound foolishness and arrognace of the US reaction to 2001 September set off a chain of events from which we will probably never recover ... and I can not help but identify with these two families, because of that. How to say this, the actions, lies, truth, contractions and conflict are emblematic of the times, even if these are not directly involved in the movie.
What is part of the movie is the social-economic-cultural cross section of Iranian society, and the subtext of the struggle between an older layer of tradition and a newer layer directed toward more western social modernity.
I would really like to know how this movie plays in Cairo. Anybody know?
CG