We Need to Talk About Cyril

No sign of dad in The Kid With a Bike.

* * 1/2  The Kid With a Bike. Written and directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne.

Fathers. Who needs 'em?

            A recent long-term study of children raised by lesbian couples reported some surprising results. After following eighty-four families from birth to age seventeen, researchers Nannette Gartrell and Henry Bos showed their subjects not only matched their straight-raised peers by most measures, but were actually superior in academic performance. Children of lesbian parents also more self-confident, showed more social competence, and had fewer disciplinary problems.

            Studies like Gartrell-Bos need to be taken with a grain of salt, because only the most motivated, conscientious parents-to-be (including ones with something to prove) tend to sign up for studies that take decades to complete. But this hasn’t stopped some advocates for same-sex marriage from touting them uncritically. The other implication of their argument—that having a male parent around is not only unnecessary, but actually harms academic performance, self-confidence, and discipline, is never talked about. Yet if you buy the study, the logic is inescapable: to raise well-adjusted kids, it’s better to have that second female around than a male.

            Though outwardly beyond dispute, our collective esteem for fathers has never been lower. The word “patriarchy”—literally, “rule of the father”—is now a dirty one, while the female equivalent has a hip, sandalwood-scented wholesomeness to it. For quite a few  people, a free-association exercise starting with the word “dad” only elicits the response “deadbeat”. And if you can name a current prime-time TV sitcom or commercial where, for a change, the father is handsome and wise and the mother the fatuous, overgrown kid, please write to us here, care of The Tompkins Weekly.

            None of which has much directly to do with the Dardenne Brothers The Kid With a Bike, except that it compelled my attention so intermittently that thoughts on the state of modern fatherhood were never far away. The film concerns Cyril (Thomas Doret), a ten year-old boy who yearns for his père Guy (Jérémie Renier), even though the latter abandoned him to a state-run institution in the bleak exurbs of Liège, Belgium. His increasingly desperate attempts to contact the disinterested Guy doesn’t get him back. Instead, the boy somehow attracts the sympathy of Samantha (Cécile De France), a single hairdresser in the neighborhood. For Cyril, being fostered by Samantha beats life at the orphanage, but is no substitute for his dad. That role gets taken up by Wes (Egon Di Mateo), a local tough who only pretends to befriend Cyril as he uses him to stage petty thefts in the neighborhood.

            The Kid With a Bike is a small-scale story with big themes on its mind. With such films as La Promesse (1996) and The Son (2002), the Dardennes have developed a reputation for gritty, unadorned stories from Europe’s underbelly. Kid is perhaps their most accessible offering yet. Though the film never explicitly cites them, it is set against a tradition of big-city father-figure-and-son stories like Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921) and Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948), and at its best has something of the emotional punch of those classics.

            For all that’s good about it, though—the directness, the aired-out simplicity, the quiet power of the performances of Doret and De France—there just not enough of it. Samantha clings to Cyril with the tenacity of a barnacle, even sacrificing her relationship with her long-term boyfriend (Laurent Caron) for him. But the Dardennes, in their trop cool refusal to psychoanalyze their characters, never account for why. With respect to this key element, the Dardennes are not practicing minimalism as much as deprivation. Explaining Samantha’s motive would not necessarily have entailed dull verbal exposition; it simply would have entailed some creativity.

            The ending, though well done, likewise leaves a feeling of a job left incomplete. To repeat, there are some strong moments here. But there are also surprisingly ham-handed ones, as when the Dardennes fire up the Deutsche Grammophone to pound out emotional cues from Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto (Can you feel that? Can you feel it?). Overall, the rapturous critical reception to this movie seems to have more to do with its intentions than what it delivers.

            Whatever Samantha’s motive, Cyril is obviously better off with her than the feckless chump who acted essentially as his sperm donor. He wants his father, but does he need him? One thing’s for sure: guys like Guy love to excuse themselves by insisting their kids are “better off without them”. Results of studies like Gartrell-Bos, though inspiring to same-sex couples, unintentionally play into such excuses among the much, much larger number of at-risk straight families. The lessons of sociology, like parenthood itself, are rarely unmixed blessings.

© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro

Smells Like the Human Spirit

* * *  In Darkness. Written by David F. Shamoon, based on the book by Robert Marshall. Directed by Agnieszka Holland.

Wieckiewicz as working-class Moses In Darkness

 

After the better part of a century and hundreds of films, you might think every conceivable angle on the Nazi Holocaust has been covered. We’ve gotten comprehensive views of the tragedy in such works as the 1978 ABC miniseries Holocaust and Schindler’s List, and we’ve gotten the narrow, subjective view in The Pianist. We’ve gotten stories about conspirators (The Wannsee Conference), collaborators (Mephisto, The Counterfeiters), resistors (Triumph of the Spirit, Defiance, Escape from Sobibor), Jews in hiding (The Diary of Anne Frank), Jews passing for German (Europa Europa), Germans on the run (Marathon Man, The Reader), spies (Black Book), children (The Tin Drum, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas), mothers (Sophie’s Choice), fathers (Life is Beautiful), even mutants (briefly, in the first X-Men). And that’s just counting the non-documentaries.

            With In Darkness, director Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa, Treme, Angry Harvest) has found a fresh line of attack—albeit an extremely low-angle one. In German-occupied Poland, Jews were herded into ghettoes in preparation for deportation and liquidation. In the town of Lvov—as in the more-famous Warsaw uprising—some Jews escaped underground, where they eked out precarious existences in gloom and filth, until the country was “liberated” by the Russians fourteen months later.   

            The sewers of Lvov, it turns out, were the bailiwick of Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), a native Polish sanitation worker and part-time thief. At first, Leopold can scarcely spare a thought for the “Yids”, against whom many beleaguered and minimally-educated Poles keep a petty, spiteful sort of bigotry. His only motivation in hiding them is extorting money from the wealthy Chiger family (Maria Schrader and Herbert Knaup). But like a working-class Oskar Schindler, Leopold discovers a better, more humane side of himself as he becomes invested in the struggle of the Chigers and their companions, including a valiant bruiser (Benno Fürmann), a  lout’s pregnant mistress, and especially the children. Before long he’s running heroic risks for “his” fourteen Jews, proving that even an ordinary man with shit under this nails could summon more moral courage than other, more powerful people who did nothing. (The historical Leopold Socha is commemorated in Israel as one of “The Righteous Among the Nations”, non-Jews who helped defy the Nazi genocide.)

            Holland, a half-Jew who lost her grandparents in the Warsaw uprising and whose gentile mother helped Jews escape the Nazi round-ups, has a keen feel for the moral ambiguities at the margins of both communities. Neither her Poles nor her Jews are rendered simplistically; both groups are divided against themselves, and show as much selfishness as they do courage. This richness lends In Darkness a feel of authenticity that is rarely found in stories with such enormous—and crushingly obvious—moral stakes. Wieckiewicz’s portrayal of Socha shows less Hollywood romanticism than the boozy, low-key venality of a Rainer Werner Fassbinder anti-hero. He is never less than terrific.

            So why isn’t In Darkness easier to watch? The problem is the down-side of Holland’s unromanticized approach: with its claustrophobic underground spaces shot claustrophobically, lit only with jiggling flashlights, it becomes so hard to tell the grime-faced characters apart. Just following them becomes such a labor that we barely have energy enough to care about their problems.

            The subject justifies it, but In Darkness still demands the viewer to spend two and half hours crawling around a Polish cesspit. That might not require heroism, but it does take commitment.

© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro

         

Only Connect

Segel and Helms can't relate in Jeff, Who Lives at Home.

***1/2  Jeff, Who Lives at Home.  Written and directed by Jay & Mark Duplass. 

Based on the title and the marketing, you might suppose Jay and Mark Duplass’ Jeff, Who Lives at Home is some kind of slacker comedy—the kind of thing the soft, round spirit of Seth Rogan hovers over like a sweet puff of bong smoke.  But it turns out that Rogan isn’t in this movie, and you’d be wrong in assuming much about what the Duplass brothers have cooked up.

            Jeff (Jason Segel) is a soft-bodied sasquatch of a guy who lives at home with his mom Sharon (Susan Sarandon). His lifestyle does involve plenty of couch time and yes, a bong. But Jeff is lazy only in the way a permanent existential crisis can inspire—weed and solitude have made him into a kind of suburban yogi, on a never ending quest for snacks and his place in the cosmic order. Things get interesting when his mom sends him on an errand to Home Depot, and he meets up with his brother older brother Pat (Ed Helms). The latter is the sibling who’s made all the ”right” choices—job, marriage, expensive toys like a Porsche. But things are not so good for the dickish Pat, as his wife (Judy Greer) may or may not be having an affair, and only the reluctant Jeff can help find out the truth.

            The comedy here rarely involves big laughs, but lies more in the realm of “funny ‘cause it’s true”. The Duplass’, meanwhile, have released Jeff against a highly topical discussion of so-called “boomerang kids”—the estimated three million US adults in their twenties forced by unemployment to move back in with their parents. These are not always underachievers, mind you, but young people who perhaps foolishly believed that their prime years would bring them more opportunities than careers in tech support or the day shift at Applebee’s. Public debate usually involves questions like “what’s wrong with these kids?”, but the Duplass’ (Baghead, Cyrus) have a more nuanced view of the issue, framing it not in terms of right or wrong but of comparative fulfillment. Pat and Sharon may have jobs, but they don’t necessarily have purposes; Jeff may wear nothing more complicated than gym shorts, but he seems to grasp our profound need to, as E.M. Forster famously said, “only connect”.

            As he did in Freaks and Geeks and the surprisingly human Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Jason Segel explores new modes and colors of oafishness here. The contrast with Ed (The Office, The Hangover) Helms, who has long cultivated an image of insanity in a bland package, is not exactly subtle but it works. They look nothing alike, but as brothers who both need and loathe each other they are more than plausible. The only weakness is that the plot strand involving Susan Sarandon—an office romance with a surprising twist—seems cut off in its own narrative universe. If the brother Duplass’ had found a way to make the plot strands of Jeff connect as well as its characters, it might really have been worth getting off the couch for. 

© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro

Reality Show of the Flies

Artemis lives: Jennifer Lawrence flexes in The Hunger Games

* * * The Hunger Games. Written by Gary Ross, Suzanne Collins & Billy Ray. Directed by Gary Ross.

Once upon a time “young adult” books lived in a ghetto—a niche market of fantasy, adventure and cautionary tales for ‘tweeners and young teens not yet in the coveted 18-24 year old demographic. Perhaps it was Harry Potter, or perhaps just the inevitable next step in the juvenilization of American culture, but those days are long gone. The Twilight series regularly tops The New York Times bestseller list. J.K. Rowling’s books occupy no fewer than seven of the top ten spots in USA Today’s list of the 150 bestselling books of the last 15 years.  (Pity poor Dan Brown by comparison, who nominally writes for adults yet ranks only #3 and #13.) Suzanne Collins’ teen survival epic The Hunger Games has sold more than 24 million copies just in the US. Gary Ross’ movie version of Games just recorded the third-best opening weekend in movie history, at $155 million. “Young adult” is not just out of the ghetto now, it is mainstream.

            These big numbers are driven not just by sales to kids.  Collin’s book is pretty grim material—the story of Katniss, a 16 year-old girl living in a dystopian future where most of the population of “what is left of North America” are enslaved, and 24 teenagers are forced to fight to the death in an annual televised reality show called The Hunger Games. For anyone old enough to be dead in Logan’s Run, reading the book brings on a regular series of responses. Stage One is recognition of the many obvious sources of material for Collins’ premise—Survivor, The Most Dangerous Game, Gladiator, Logan’s Run, The Truman Show, Lord of the Flies, Rollerball, at least one episode of the original Star Trek. Stage Two is dismay at the threadbare prose, which has the feel of a movie treatment more than a full-fledged novel, with language that is decidedly not from the upper slopes of Mount Parnassus (“You could hear a pin drop,” she writes. “I’m biting my nails like there’s no tomorrow.”) But then comes Stage Three, absorption, because Collins’ plot has such enormous momentum it is physically impossible not to turn the pages. After devouring it, the reader at last enters Stages Four, acceptance—followed perhaps by awe at the commercial juggernaut Collins has unleashed.  

            Like the makers of Watchmen a couple of years ago, Ross (Seabiscuit) seems to have made the movie version of Hunger Games half-gazing over his shoulder, as if worried the slightest departure from “canon” will be punished by its fans. And indeed, the virtues of the movie match those of the book—the engrossing, hurtling plot and likeable heroine offsetting the derivative premise and under-imagined setting. As Katniss, a teen from the coal-lands of Appalachia forced to grow up early, Kentucky-born Jennifer Lawrence is perfectly cast, for she played a virtually identical character in Winter’s Bone in 2010. Her modesty and anti-glamor, which give all signs of not being an act, give Games more heart than most spring blockbusters I can remember.

            This being election season, it’s tempting to interpret how this movie will be read politically. The Hunger Games are staged by Katniss’ overlords in the Capitol, whom Collins and Ross portray as supercilious ninnies living off the honest labor of the working-class Districts. The actor playing “Effie Trinket”, for instance, appears under so much pancake makeup, periwigged and perched on such high and tiny heels, she’s barely recognizable as Elizabeth Banks. Such freaks can be read as the bogies of either end of the political spectrum: for conservatives, the Capitol obviously represents the class of rich, out-of-touch government regulators, living it up inside the Beltway. On the Left, meanwhile, they might be read as the Wall Street 1%, living large on the rules they have rigged for their own benefit. All that sounds like a wash—except for one small but telling detail: when Katniss and her team-mate Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) are whisked from District 12 (Appalachia) to the Capitol (somewhere in Rockies), they go not on a plane, which obviously would be fastest, but by high-speed rail.  You know—the kind of train Obama wants to build, but Republican governors from Wisconsin to Florida have refused as big-government boondoggles.  If you heard that dog-whistle, you just might be a Tea Party “patriot”.

            Much of the Games-related scuttlebutt in the Twitterverse is over on the question “Do kids really kill kids in this movie?” Yes, Virginia, they indeed do, and sometimes with extreme prejudice. In a post-Columbine world, this may have a more ominous ring than Collins intended. While there are bloodier movies around, and I sincerely doubt many kids will be tempted to stage Hunger Games of their own, this movie deserves its PG-13 rating. Best keep the smaller Tributes at home until they’re of age.

© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro

Parent Trap

Not pleased to meet you in We Need to Talk About Kevin.

* * *  We Need to Talk About Kevin.  Written by Lynne Ramsay & Rory Kinnear, based on a novel by Lionel Shriver. Directed by Lynne Ramsay.

According to recent figures, 20% of American women don’t even start planning their pregnancies until after the age of 35. Instances of male infertility are likewise up because more potential fathers are putting off the big plunge. The delay is usually blamed on the demands of career or education. But all that seems more like a symptom than a cause, the consequence of a larger shift in priorities toward personal fulfillment—the notion that one needs to perfect oneself before venturing to procreate. At its crudest, it’s wrapped up in anxieties about the expense and bother of parenthood, because once you have a kid your life is basically over, right?

            Whatever its other virtues and weaknesses, Lynne Ramsay’s domestic horror We Need to Talk About Kevin trades skillfully in these anxieties. It’s the story of Eva (Tilda Swinton), a woman we first meet in a maelstrom of guilt and despair after some undisclosed tragedy. Through deftly arranged flashbacks, the script by Ramsay and Rory Kinnear fills out the story of Eva’s relationship with Kevin (played as a teen by Ezra Miller), the son who seems to have taken root in Eva’s womb with the sole purpose making a hell of her life.  As an infant Kevin is so colicky Eva seeks out jack-hammers to drown out his crying; in toddler-hood he’s so unresponsive she fears he’s autistic—until he opts to respond only with spite and viciousness. Dad (John C. Reilly) doesn’t get it, of course, because Kevin is a perfect angel around him. As the terrible twos give way to even more terrible ‘tweens and teens, Kevin’s machinations against his poor Mum become ever more sadistic, culminating in a final act of senseless violence that leaves Eva alone and reviled by everyone around her.

            No doubt, Kevin is chilling. Ramsay (Morvern Callar), a British director adapting an American novel with a British actress playing an American mother, builds to a steady crescendo of dread with her camera often no more than a foot or two  (and sometimes a few inches) from the face of pure evil. Much like Adrian Lyne in Fatal Attraction a generation ago,  she tells what is by nature an implausible story—a worst case scenario in the course of human events—with such skill that its remoteness from actual human behavior is never an issue. Or hardly ever, except when Ramsay indulges a few sledgehammer visual metaphors, such as the blood-red paint splashed on Eva’s front door she struggles to strip off (“Out, out, damn’d spot!”).

            Ramsay’s most consequential choice lay in casting the cool, humorless Swinton in a role that could have gone in nearly an infinity of directions. Alternatives like Ashley Judd or Vera Farmiga, for instance, would have been similarly intelligent, authentically American, and more obviously sympathetic. But Ramsay doesn’t want Eva to be automatically sympathetic. Kevin, after all, is a reflection of her, of her dread at the prospect of compromising her life. As Ramsay clearly shows, she is dejected by Kevin’s arrival virtually as soon as she leaves the delivery room, long before he can do much more than burble and suck.  Swinton is not so much a mother here as the Thin White Duke, a figure so otherworldly and androgynous as to be beyond the need for mere mortal reproduction. And indeed, it’s one of Kevin’s ironic pleasures that Miller plays Kevin with more feminine silkiness, more bewitching bitchiness than Swinton ever could if their roles were reversed.

            There were many times in this film when I wanted to yell at the screen, to tell Eva to show some wit, some trace of creativity in dealing with Kevin and his deliberately soiled underpants. To adapt a phrase, it takes a heart of stone not to laugh at a child’s self-defeating spite. But of course I was missing the point: Eva is a modern martyr on the cross of procreation, and it isn’t in the nature of a martyr to relieve her burden with clever tricks. Her part is only to suffer.

© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro

No Thneed for Biggering

* * Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax. Written by Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul, based on the book by Dr. Seuss. Directed by Chris Renaud and Kyle Balda.

* * * 1/2   The Secret World of Arrietty.  Written by Hayao Miyazaki &  Keiko Niwa, based on a novel by Mary Norton. Directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi. 

The Once-ler takes a whack in The Lorax.

A day at the movies should be magic, you see

for kids who are ninety or only just three.

So Hollywood set about making a film very large of a short ecological screed

called The Lorax.

Dr. Seuss wrote this book long ago,

When hippies in town let their hair grow.

It was short and sweet and oh so clear,

this elegant plea to save all we hold dear.

Read it on a plane and you’ll see,  or a boat,

a car, a train or in a moat.

Won't you read The Lorax?

The story is classic, about a young youngster

who learns the tale of a man called the Once-ler,

a newcomer to the forest of truffula trees,

who cut them all down because of his greed

to fashion their tufts into garments called Thneeds.

He was warned, of course, of life's bitter facts,

like what happens when our forests get whacked.

Who spoke for the trees? It was the Lorax.

But don't see the movie, I beg you and plead

for busy it is, and too long and guaranteed

to bore you to death with its desperate need

to be all things to all ages, and indeed,

it is much like a thneed, this Lorax.

It really is nice in this age of Santorum,

With its war on sense and all with clitorum,

to close your eyes and imagine a fellow

of such grace, wit, and decorum

As the Lorax.

But the movie strikes all the wrong notes

as it offers lame songs and unfunny jokes,

As Seuss says, though "biggered" to an extreme,

I guess we can be thankful at least

that making this film harmed no truffula trees.

*  *  *

Small is beautiful in The Secret World of Arrietty.

If truffula trees were native to Japan, there probably would still be plenty of them. Notwithstanding its industrialized image, Japan is among the most heavily forested nations on earth. This is because Japanese Once-lers pay other nations to cut down their trees instead.

            Thankfully, along with deforestation, Japan exports the films of Studio Ghibli, the now legendary house of animation that gave us Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away, Ponyo and a half dozen other truly unique creations. Lately, the studio’s visionary co-founder Hayao Miyazaki has stepped back from directing, leaving the task to animator Hiromasa Yonebayashi for Ghibli’s latest, The Secret World of Arrietty.

            Delegating those chores away hasn’t diminished the final product: this is a Miyazaki film in all but name, and is quite wonderful. That’s “wonderful” in the literal sense—as in full of wonder. Based on Mary Norton’s book The Borrowers, it concerns the unlikely friendship between a sickly boy (voiced by David Henrie) and Arrietty (Bridget Mendler), a four inch-tall sprite who lives between the floorboards with her Pop and Mum (David Arnett and Amy Poehler). The little folk are human in all but size, and just want to be left alone to filch bay leaves and cubes of sugar and other small necessities of life from the humans. Having discovered the Borrowers by accident, the boy sees them as the cures for his loneliness; Arrietty, likewise curious, encourages him despite herself and the dark forebodings of her father.

            The root of Arrietty’s appeal, as in most Ghibli films, lies more in its treatment than its story. Using old-fashioned hand-drawn cel animation, it conjures a universe in the space of a single backyard. Miyazaki asks “what is important for us to see?” and forces nothing more—in contrast to The Lorax, which seems to demand how much more banter and music and color it can shoehorn into the frame. Where the American film feels over-stuffed and over-busy, as if afraid it can’t sustain close scrutiny, Arrietty is confident enough to entertain us and invite us to think at the same time. Often, it takes the patience of an adult to tell the best stories for children. 

© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro

Good vs. Good and God Against All

Hatami and Maadi have differences in A Separation.

* * * 1/2  A Separation. Written and directed by Asghar Farhadi. In Farsi. 

I’ve been seeing a lot of Anthony Bourdain on TV lately, which has naturally inspired analogies between food and film criticism. No surprise that much of what you get at the multiplex is like the stuff they serve at the snack counter: sugary or fatty confections that offer up little more than a superficial head-rush. Indeed, watching movies like Transformers: Dark of the Moon, like eating Ring Dings, will not only yield zero nutritional benefit, but kill you slowly and make you cruel to small animals.  Yet some of the fare served up at the “art house” isn’t much better—The Descendants, for instance, is like a nouvelle cuisine experience that is heavy on premise and eye-appeal but light on the plate. On my way home from that film, I was still hungry for some drama, and ended up eating some Ring Dings anyway.

            Say what you will about Iranian movies, but they are always full meals. Regardless of their actual running times, films by the likes of Abbas Kiarostami (A Taste of Cherry), Dariush Mehrjui (Leila) or Mohammad Rasoulof (The White Meadows) tend to be long, deliberate affairs, with each finely wrought course brought out in its own time and not a second faster. Like many a heavy meal, they can leave you sleepy. But there’s no questioning their authenticity, their full, sustaining themes, or the pungency of their ingredients.

            The latest Persian entrée (and winner of the 2011 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film) is Asghar Farhadi’s searing family drama A Separation. It opens with estranged couple Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Maadi) directing their appeals straight into the camera, which stands in for an unseen (and none too sympathetic) judge.  Simin has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study abroad, and wants Nader and their daughter Termeh (Sarina Fadhadi) to go with her. Nader has no particular objection to this, but can’t abandon his father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi), who suffers from Alzheimer’s and is completely dependent on him for his care.  At what seems like the end of a long, fruitless argument, Simin demands—quite unreasonably—“What’s worse, leaving an old man or abandoning your daughter?” To which Nader asks (equally unreasonably) “What kind of wife asks that of a man?” In despair, Simin demands a divorce, which still qualifies as a drastic measure in the Islamic republic. And to her sorrow, Nader has no particular objection to splitting up either. It’s the judge who refuses to end their marriage, calling their impasse “a little problem.” The rest of Farhadi’s script seems designed to show just how wrong he is.

            In the fashion of classical tragedy, the couple’s discord is the seminal transgression that sends ripples of disaster through everyone they know. Simin leaves to stay with her parents, forcing Nader to entrust his father to a marginally competent bumpkin (Sareh Bayat). She, in turn, is afraid her hot-headed husband (Shahab Hosseini) will find out she’s secretly taken a job caring for a physically incontinent male. The arrangement ends in a disaster that unfolds with the soul-scorching slowness of a car crash with you, dear viewer, at the center.

            Farhadi shows striking discipline with his camera, shooting hand-held in a way that reflects and abets the growing tension. Nor are there any weaknesses among the performances: Maadi is constantly compelling as Nader, a man too close to the end of his rope to worry much about little things like integrity or how badly he appears in his daughter’s eyes. The lovely Hatami, already a veteran player at forty, plays her role with the steely resolve of a Persian Irene Papas. But the film’s soul is invested with young Sarina Farhadi, portraying the only child of the warring couple (and, in fact, the director’s own daughter). Keeping up her studies and her loyalties to both parents, she’s hanging on by her fingernails here, and we feel the rending of her heart with every tear.

            This is powerful stuff, and if there’s any objecting to it, it’s by mere implication. Like tragedies from Antigone to Medea to Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, this one is rooted in a woman’s insistence on justice. This is not Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan—in Iran, women’s legal rights are far more likely to be recognized—but there can be no doubt where even a moderately conservative mind would place the blame here. In a dispute between a husband who wants only to care for his dying father and a wife who yearns for personal fulfillment abroad, the verdict would likely be the same in Tacoma as in Tehran: for the sake of her husband and daughter, she should put her dreams on hold. It’s an implication that won’t sit well in some circles. 

            In Farhadi’s defense, it is perhaps our own progressivist naivete that insists that all liberal developments—such as respecting women’s right to pursue happiness outside the home—are “win wins” for everybody. By the dignity in which he invests Hatami’s character in A Separation, Farhadi seems to be no reactionary in matters of gender. But there’s also a coldness there, a pitilessness that is its own kind of violence. In an interview, Farhadi has observed “In a classic tragedy, there is a war between good and evil, but in modern tragedies, the war is between good and good… you don’t know which character you want to win, which one you want to lose, and you’re probably not going to feel good about either.”
           In suggesting there are really no “win wins” in human affairs, Farhadi may indeed be a reactionary. Or just too honest for everyone’s comfort.

© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro