A Separation Gets A Deserved Extension At The Music Box
By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Feb 1, 2012 11:00PM
Receiving two Academy Awards nominations last week seems to have put some wind in the sails of arguably one of the best films of the past year, Asghar Farhadi's A Separation. The nod for Best Foreign Picture (for which it ought to be heavily favored) was long anticipated. Farhadi's nomination for Best Original Screenplay was a downright coup: foreign-language scripts almost never receive such recognition. Now it seems the Music Box will hold the film for a couple more weeks after its scheduled initial run concludes tomorrow night.
The film is more intelligent, and possibly more rewarding, than anything else currently in release. The separation of a mother who wants to leave Iran in search of a better life for her daughter and a father who cannot in the end go along with that plan tips an increasingly ominous series of dominoes which we watch fall in crushing succession: the fate of the Alzeimer's-afflicted grandfather, an impoverished domestic worker and her family caught in between, the custody and well-being of tha daughter in whose interest so much of the action is claimed to take place. When the father and the housekeeper have a physical altercation and she has a subsequent miscarriage, the stakes of the drama escalate rapidly.
We'd rather not give too much about the plot away, as this potentially maudlin raw material is handled so deftly that the suspense created by its plotting was one of the things we cherished most. The portrait of emotional turmoil is agonizingly real, a high drama created without any resort to cheap tricks, false notes, or flat characters. We recognize everyone is doing what they think is the right thing, and that they are often still wrong. The opening shot, in which the husband and wife are depicted from the point of view of the judge hearing their petition for divorce, establishes a privileged and fraught perspective for the audience, neatly corresponding to the uncomfortable message it is up to you to decide what is right. As in life, this is often not as easy as it seems.
Beyond being extraordinarily engrossing and naturalistically acted, the film's Tehran setting and humanistic depiction of ordinary people dealing with an identifiably universal knot of ethical and emotiona problems make A Separation essential viewing. Since pulling down three big awards at the Berlin International Film Festival, this is a film that has had both critics and audiences cheering in unison. There is no new film currently in theaters more worth your time than this one.
A Separation plays at 4:20 p.m, 7 p.m. and 9:35 p.m at The Music Box, 3733 N. Southport Ave., today and tomorrow, with held over dates and times TBD.