99% A Separation

All Critics (106) | Top Critics (36) | Fresh (106) | Rotten (1) | DVD (2)

Very few movies capture as convincingly as A Separation does the ways in which seemingly honorable decisions can lead to interpersonal conflict -- even disaster.

To say the piercing Iranian film A Separation is about divorce is a bit like saying The Wizard of Oz is about a pair of slippers.

"A Separation" moves beyond one couple's sundering marriage to reveal growing rifts between generations, ideologies, religious mind-sets, genders and classes in contemporary Iran.

"A Separation" is a great movie, a look inside a world so foreign that it might as well be another planet, yet so universal that its observations are painfully familiar to anyone, anywhere.

Asghar Farhadi's emotionally epic movie is not just a masterpiece dramatically, it is a movie dramatically of its moment.

It's small. It's real. And it's deeply moving.

A tragically familiar family drama whose heartbreaking "for want of a nail" sequence of events spirals out of control at an intimate and individual level.

A Separation shows the human struggle for respect and a better life. It's a struggle rife with human frailty. Asghar Farhadi is a sly writer and director, and leaves us with questions that are provocative and elusive.

Smart, provocative, and brimming with ungovernable human emotions.

A meandering, nerve-wracking, ultimately worthwhile tour of contemporary Iranian urban life.

Above all, Farhadi?s parable teaches that a rush to judgment inevitably turns back on the judge.

It's a portrait of an essential and sympathetic human dilemma, and in that it's both real and timeless in ways that transcend borders, cultures and languages.

Is it possible, the movie asks, that children, with their belief in absolutes, have purer moral compasses than their forced-to-compromise parents?

Partly a courtroom drama, partly a political satire and partly a twisty thriller that gradually draws you in and becomes more engrossing with each new revelation.

Expectedly, the volatility is penetrating, but the feature is methodical, stewing in every last moment of unease and contemplation, stretching to a point where Farhadi is practically lapping himself.

A quietly lacerating portrait of familial discord that morphs into a wider portrait of society and law...While the setting might be foreign, its concerns are universal.

Ambiguous and enigmatic, it revolves around the termination of a marriage in contemporary Tehran.

Farhadi's carefully wrought narrative and the ways it handles the fragile emotions of its characters truly sets it apart, not only from contemporary Iranian cinema but world cinema in general.

What counts is that talented writer/director Asghar Farhadi structures it in a culturally compelling and mysterious way, while balancing all the characters to avoid easily typed "good guys" and "bad guys."

Emotionally resonant beyond the filmmaker's own country and culture, it is a compassionate yet searingly precise film that refuses to name villains, nor to let any of its protagonists off the hook

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/a_separation_2011/

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