Rating: 4.5/5 
The wordy stage play feel, mixed with a roving camera and some expressively crowded settings, places it in the pantheon of the relationship movies, like Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives and especially Ingmar Bergman’s harrowing Scenes from a Marriage, films which burrow deep into the wreckage of failed relationships. The difference is that A Separation extends its turmoil outward, to surrounding families and finally to the Iranian nation itself, resulting in a world that feels positively stifling.
Things start with the titular separation. Frustrated by her husband’s refusal to leave the country and unable to take her daughter abroad without his consent, Simin (Leila Hatami) moves out of their home. This forces Nader (Peyman Moadi) to hire a woman to watch over his ailing father – a sneaky symbol for Iran’s crusty patriarchal system – as his physical state rapidly deteriorates. Early on, the film concerns itself with the difficulties of this new caretaker Razieh (Sareh Bayat), trying to balance duties as a wife with those of caring for a sick man. In one early scene he urinates on himself, a situation which Razieh, forbidden to touch a member of the opposite sex without others present, is unable to remedy.
There’s the sense early on that director Asghar Farhadi is playing up these kind of situations purely for the discomfort factor, but he proves to have a lot more in mind, offering a complicated story that follows one twist after another. Complicated situations abound, motivated by a dialectic between traditional modern rules, duty and personal need, its characters see-sawing back and forth between progress and fear. The rest of the film is dominated by the increasingly embattled situation between Nader and Simin’s family and that of Razieh after their work arrangement is engulfed by an increasingly nasty legal battle. The route the film follows is jagged, but across these torrents of words it somehow manages to be increasingly surprising and fresh, finding new and more painful territory to navigate.
The result is a rare collusion of the political and the deeply personal, probably the most acutely balanced Iranian film since Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold, a similarly complex tale with fable-like roots. A Separation squanders some of this promise with a jarring third act plot twist that feels out of place in such an otherwise balanced story, but the final result is still impressive, making for one of the most complex and remarkable films of the year.
