Ashar Farhati is a sharp-minded Iranian director whose work retains the shadow of traditional Iranian cinema, but also skillfully expresses his profound ideas through more dramatic character conflicts and realistic records of Iranian society, family, and people.
The movie "A Separation" is his classic representative work, which escalates from the contradiction between husband and wife to the multiple conflicts of two families, individuals and society, human nature and moral beliefs, etc., which implys the thinking and exploration of the current situation of Iranian society, without criticism, and without clear values, but only with an open-ended ending to guide the audience to think together. Through the strict Censorship of Iranian films, more people can understand the current situation in Iran and resonate with the ideas conveyed by the director.
No matter what stage of life the audience is in, or different classes, when feeling the full and tense plot of the movie, it is
Will fall into the director-led multiple scrutiny and exploration. And that's the beauty of the film being able to win multiple heavyweight awards and receive high ratings.
The most direct employment relationship in the film is that Nader hires Reitz as a nanny, but this is not the only clue that shows the imperfection of the labor system. Among them, Reitz's husband Samadi and Temin's tutor have hidden employment relationships.
Nader was well known for his father's filial piety, so he attached great importance to recruiting a suitable and reassuring nanny. Reitz was introduced by his wife's friend, who seemed honest and had an urgent need for a salary. In practice, Reitz also showed her sense of responsibility, and she did her best to take care of Nader's father, who had Alzheimer's disease, and caused the accident of being hit by a car.
However, when Nader once returned home early and saw his father being abused, the conflict broke out in an instant. Nader, who is in the middle class, can't understand that he pays for bad results. After discovering that the family's money was lost, he couldn't help but think that the nanny Reitz had done it. Although Reitz returns and tries to explain, Nader's strong refusal complicates the otherwise simple question.
Even though Nader didn't accept her explanation, the attitude of not even paying his salary when he was kicked out of the house made Reitz feel unacceptable. When she returned to the house again, the explanation was no longer important, just to get her salary back. However, the issue is not mentioned in court proceedings and the film until the end.
Doesn't Reitz's salary matter? The results of her day-to-day work are based on the personal knowledge of her employer, Nader. Compared with the more secure housekeeping companies, the risk to each other is actually magnified a lot. This can be seen from the plot of Reitz's desperate struggle for wages, and how helpless it is.
In the film, Samadi is repeatedly told that Samadi is a depressed unemployed person, he told in front of the judge that he worked in a shoe repair shop for more than ten years, and as a result, he was ruthlessly expelled, for which he has fought a lawsuit for more than a year, but there is no result so far. As a low-level worker, his rights and interests are not guaranteed, and it directly leads to his debt to life and anxiety about life.
The employment relationship of the role of tutor is more obscure, and as a profession with more autonomy, she still has to face the interests of her employer and has to go against her conscience to prove false evidence. Although in the end she told the truth, it was only under the coercion of Samadi that she had no choice. Even if they are also middle-class, the employed party in the employment relationship still has no voice, and after encountering conflict, they face the dilemma of either lying and continuing to earn money, or describing the facts but losing their jobs.
The elderly, middle-aged and children are the three-tier character relationship that stands out in the film, and in their attitudes towards problems, there are different ideological cognitions explicitly and implicitly.
The most immediate conflict arises between the two daughters and their parents. Termin is angry that her father lied to the judge when she heard the news of Reitz's pregnancy, and she can't let go of herself and will follow her conscience. Although she did not show Reitz's devotion to religious beliefs, her inner uneasiness led him to ask her father many times if he really did not hear. For her mother's selfishness, she wanted to stay and try to hold her back, but in the end, after experiencing this storm, the family still faced falling apart.
Reitz's younger daughter also showed an incomprehensible look when she hid the fact that she had been hit by a car from her mother. She may not know what she is going to face, but the simple knowledge of right and wrong is still available. Through her increasingly complex eyes, the pure heart undoubtedly suffered a huge shock.
The dark line of conflict between parents and children manifests itself between Nader's father and son. The father, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease, can only use a few simple words, and may not even know the son, but Nader insists on staying in Iran to take care of him. For the conflict after hiring a nanny, the film camera repeatedly gives this father who cannot express himself, he is silently observing, there is no verbal expression, but after the conflict, he hides in the toilet to clean up his body. My father actually understood what was happening, he could see the facts, he understood it clearly, and even felt guilty for his own drag. This can be seen from the silent resistance of cleaning one's own body and when testing one's injuries in the hospital.
The appearance of Westminster's mother in the story can actually be understood as the role of "speaking for Nader's father". She came to her rescue after her son-in-law was in trouble, and even offered the idea of replacing the bail with the property book. Compared with the complex thinking of middle-aged people, the elderly look at problems more calmly and objectively. How to get through the difficulties smoothly and let life continue, this is the starting point for them to deal with the problem. And does it really matter who is right and who is wrong? In the difficult to sort out the incident, perhaps the quick knife cutting the chaos is the voice of the old man after years of turmoil.
The different life experiences and situations of the three generations determine the fundamental differences in their views on the problem. The daughter needs to prove whether the ideological education received is reliable, the middle-aged people stand on both ends of the interests and sway left and right, the elderly want to calm things down as soon as possible, and there is nothing wrong with looking at them from their own point of view, but they cannot satisfactorily solve the contradictions between the two families.
As the core unit of social composition, when multiple ideas and concepts coexist and intertwine, contradictions and conflicts of diversity will inevitably erupt. The four different concepts of the two family members in the film are undoubtedly a portrayal of the complex situation of Iranian society.
The conflict between Nader and Westminster is manifested in the inconsistency of life concepts. Their families are middle-class and have the ability to emigrate abroad to give their daughters a better education and survive in a more ideal social environment. But compared to Westminster's enthusiasm for immigration, Nader was cold.
The need for a father to be cared for is one reason, but more importantly, Nader is full of affection for the country. Just as when the two asked their father when they divorced, he might not even know who he was, he was surprised and asked a few whys, and without hesitation, he countered: "I know he is my father." This father is similar and unified with the concept of the state, and Nader does not want to escape reality, but wants to stay at home and practice his outlook on life. Even if both of them admit that the other is a good person, the different views on life still lead to the end of their marriage.
Reitz's conflict with Samadi is reflected in differences in values. Samadi's plight brought Samadi to the brink of mental collapse, and he and his wife had the same devout moral beliefs, but they struggled with the possibility of receiving a large amount of compensation. It can be seen from the fact that he slapped himself and smashed the glass of Nader's car after snatching the door out, he wanted to solve his life's predicament through compensation. But his wife firmly followed her moral beliefs and refused to accept compensation, which made him feel even more depressed about himself and his life.
Perhaps, Samadi will be imprisoned again for debt problems, but in his wife's values, this is the punishment that should be accepted, and such unresolved contradictions and conflicts are the biggest obstacle for the family to break free from the predicament.
The Quran is at the heart of Islamic religious culture, and the two swearing scenes in the film are closely related to it. Its role in the problem-solving process is even higher than that of the law, which reflects the fierce conflict between moral beliefs and the reality of good and evil in human nature.
Samadi's mania is associated with unemployment and hardship in life, and when he does not know the cause of his wife's miscarriage, he behaves in the hospital as depressed and sane. However, when he learned of Nader's pushing, he began to complain to the court that it was unfair and went to the school to make trouble. In the face of the persuasion of the school's teachers, he questioned the tutors for lying and inducing his daughter to tell about domestic violence, and then swore in the Quran that he was as human as the people's teachers. After his impassioned questioning, the governess guiltily re-explained the facts to the judge.
When a nation has a thousand years of moral belief, it is difficult to change the thoughts that are rooted in the heart. The Quran in the film not only reflects the admonition role of behavior morality, but also the supreme judgment in the conflict between good and evil in human nature.
Reitz sued Nader for punishment because the injuries he suffered were directly related to working for him, and Whether he was hit by a car or pushed, Nader was inseparable. However, whether these two things led to the miscarriage, Reitz is not very sure. And Nader's action of paying a huge compensation to reconcile is unacceptable in Reitz's moral beliefs, and she believes that this money will bring disaster to the family and her daughter. The emergence of this contradiction directly led to the final result of the whole incident.
In Islam, there are broad constraints on individual practice, and people must follow order and rules, including feelings about the state and society, and a clear definition of good and evil, otherwise the practice will be meaningless. Therefore, we see that in the conflict between the moral beliefs of the film and the good and evil of human nature, they are unified in form but have irreconcilable contradictions. Reitz followed moral beliefs, but he also pushed this already difficult family into a more desperate abyss. But if she violates moral beliefs, the uneasiness of conscience thereafter is bound to haunt her for the rest of her life.
After a long period of change in Iran, the expected narrowing of the gap between the rich and the poor has not appeared, but has a tendency to widen more and more. In the film, the cognitive differences between the rich and the poor, and the resulting social unrest, are bluntly expressed.
Reitz and Samadi are in the poor, and they seem to see no hope of improvement in terms of living conditions, living difficulties and encounters. After Reez is harmed, Samadi is extremely uneasy when suing Nader for needing witness testimony, believing that the middle class is mutually partial, that they look down on the poor, and that they will not give fair testimony about what happened to them.
Combined with his more than ten years of shoe repair work, the labor dispute lasted for more than a year after being dismissed and there was no result, so he often went to jail for heavy debts. Samadi's perception of the wealthy did not happen suddenly, but was rooted in the long-standing ills of society, and the poor class he represented was not valued or even looked down upon in terms of human nature and life difficulties.
The opposite of samadi's family's perception is that Nader, who represents the wealthy class, and the people around him are diametrically opposed. When Nader saw his father fall to the ground with his arms tied and the money in the drawer lost, his reaction was that it was definitely the nanny Reitz who did it. They need money, are untrustworthy, leave their jobs privately during their work, and steal money. As for Samadi's performance, he was even more dismissive, and the poor class was rude and rude, and did not hesitate to act against his conscience in order to ask for money.
The reactions of those around Nader also have similar prejudices. Westminster offered financial compensation not because he believed her husband had hurt Reitz, but out of concern for the safety of her daughter. The tutor speculated from Reitz's daughter's painting that she suffered domestic violence, and Nader's mother-in-law's attitude toward Reitz's miscarriage, "They are still young, and they can have another one in the next year", all of which show that the cognitive difference between the rich and the poor is the root of the intensification of the contradiction.
The problem of the gap between the rich and the poor is a global problem, but after the Iranian revolution shouted the slogan of eliminating the gap between the rich and the poor, it has not been effectively improved, but has increasingly affected the harmony and stability of society. The director objectively presents this issue in the film, which is undoubtedly a complete irony.
The complexity of Iranian society is not that people lack the correct three views and present a state of disintegration, but that in the collision of traditional culture and rising modern consciousness, each has a bottom line to adhere to, and is constrained and bound to each other. Expressed in the story of the film, that is, the starting point of everyone's behavior is not wrong, but it becomes an intricate web.
First of all, traditional culture is both a constraint and a norm.
When Reitz discovers that Nader's father is urinating incontinence, she wants to help him clean up out of the idea of taking good care of the elderly, but the traditional idea of not being intimate with men and women makes her afraid to do it. So she called the church to make it clear. He did not dare to tell her husband that he was working in a divorced man's house, and let his daughter keep it a secret.
The shackles of traditional culture are fully expressed in this plot, which restricts the development of humanity and freedom. However, in other respects, traditional culture is the normative standard of human nature and morality, such as Reitz's final decision to give up compensation, which is also out of piety and respect for faith.
Second, modern consciousness pursues self-satisfaction and profit.
In the minds of the high classes and young people, modern consciousness gradually awakened. Judging from the appearance of the dress, Westminster dyed red hair and wore bright colored clothes, while Reitz was always dark clothes and veils. There is a big difference in ideological understanding, Westminster pursues independent self, actively applying for visas for this purpose, until the end of the story Westminster is preparing to leave the shackles of traditional culture. Her husband, Nader, is a traditional cultural idea, and he cannot give up his family affection to choose immigration. In the end, at the expense of the split family, he also had to stay in Iran to take care of his father.
In the conflict between the two cultural consciousnesses, there is no dialectic of right and wrong, but a sense of tearing that no one is right but cannot be integrated. People religiously follow traditional culture but are limited to difficulties and cannot find a way out, and when modern consciousness awakens and wants to break free, it must pay a heavy price. Where is the future happiness of this country and society? From the deep affection of the two daughters playing harmoniously and facing the helplessness of the time and space hole of family conflicts, it seems to be becoming more and more complicated.
Director Asha Farhati has given too much connotation in "A Parting", even if the film has no soundtrack, no strong emotional ups and downs, no aesthetic picture, but this realistic record of realism film, not only brings the audience a gripping story, but also inspires people to have a sense of social responsibility and follow the good nature of people in multiple contradictions and conflicts.
The film is full of plot and tension, and can be called a model of small-budget realistic films. As a movie lover, the film is a classic masterpiece that cannot be missed. When you are full of confusion about life, perhaps it can help you see the essence of the problem more rationally.