Literally the second A Separation begins, you link the title to what you see on screen and begin to draw obvious inferences of what the film holds for you, but that is exactly where you’re mistaken.
The Asghar Farhadi directorial is the story of what happens when a married couple Simin and Nader decide to stay separated for a few days until they draw a conclusion about their relationship state. During this time, Nader hires help to look after his demented father, and what follows is a series of unfortunate events where you can’t look at one character and take a definitive toll on their innocence.
The film doesn’t seemingly focus on the relationship between Nader and Simin for almost half of the film, but it is only later that you realise why was it important to show what an internally broken marriage does to everyone involved.
There’s a reason why the film is called A Separation and not A Divorce, and not just because the former sounds fancy. The style of narration is quite different from other films on problematic marriages.
Every element in the film initially introduced is later made sense of to its fullest and it feels like a jigsaw puzzle falling in place.
Before this, my personal favorite in the genre of representing toxic relationships/marriages, was Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road. Even though there shouldn’t be a comparison between the two, but the realism quotient in this one, surpasses my love for Revolutionary Road.
When you show problematic marriages on different levels in a society, you provide greater depth and make people face the truth of how financial aspects affect everything in some classes of the society. And it gives me immense pleasure to see it happen in A Separation.
It is possible that some might argue that the climax is open ended but it is not. The point of the story was met all along.
All in all, the film can be best defined as dark, real, intriguing, overwhelming, compassionate and considerate of all marital flaws.
The F Word 
What I love about the film ki it talks not just about martial seperation, but seperations in society writ large. Seperation bw two diff classes in society – lower and middle class, seperation bw bureaucratic institutions and the people, which in turn makes it inhumane towards the people it is supposed to serve and ofc seperation bw orthodox religion and realities of daily life. All of this is presented in such a low-key matter of fact reality that it presents such a rich tapestry of not just Iranian society but most asian societies including ours. Really such a brilliant film.
LikeLike