The Past

Asghar Farhadi’s ThePast, currently playing at Film Forum, is a cinematic short story. While some films have the breadth of the novel, this tale of an Iranian Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) who returns to France to finalize his divorce has the inexorable logic found in the work of writers who use the shorter form to focus on a character or idea. Farhadi’s previous film A Separation literally ended as a courtroom drama. The Past unfolds as a series of epiphanic testimonies. Ahmad’s wife Marie (Berenice Bejo) has taken up with Samir (Tahir Rahim) whose wife Celine (Alexandra Klebanska) is in a coma as a result of a suicide attempt. As the film unfolds the reason for the suicide is constantly transformed. There’s a short interchange in a judge’s chambers, but scene after scene is a submission of new evidence which constantly changes the complexion of reality, until in an almost dizzying shift the focus turns entirely to Samir and Celine. The disquisition of the movie is almost anachronistic in the way it invests so much weight on happenstance. The determinism, in fact,  brings to mind classic French tragedy. Ahmad could be Theseus returning home in Racine's Phedre. The narrative evolves without the kind of satire and irony you find in most contemporary movies. Every action has a consequence and even though the film does play out on a domestic canvas, one can’t help thinking of it as a political work, in the way that it presents all action as a succession of histories in which characters are finally trapped. Further credence to the presence of a subtle political allegory is given by the recurring image of the glass which separates people from each other. It happens early on when Marie spots Ahmad arriving at the airport and then in the car ride home when Ahmad sees a policewoman through his windshield yet can’t hear what she's saying. But how could a film by a prominent Iranian director with a title like The Past, even one presented in the guise of a melodrama, avoid the realities of the political sphere?

A Separation

Because the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation is not a piece of fluff and deals with a cycle of endless conflict on a microcosmic level one can’t help but look at the movie on a macrocosmic or global level. Is the small world of the movie, which deals with memory, blame and most importantly forgetting, making some sort of statement about the increasing marginalization of a major power in the Middle East? One thing is sure. A Separation starts out a surprisingly cross-cultural note—almost as a way of contravening the film’s possibly symbolic content.  Any arguing couple will recognize the agon of blame and spite that characterizes the relationship between Simin and Nader and the burden that is put on their daughter Termeh who is asked to take sides in the struggle. Arguing couples will also recognize how a flame of discord can turn a home into a tinderbox. Farhadi is quite artful in this respect since the explosive turn of events, in which the warring couple eventually becomes entwined, lurks in the conflict between Teheran’s middle class (of which Simin and Nader are members) and the disenfranchised working classes where the seeds of fundamentalist belief  reside. To the extent that it departs from its initial domestic plot, Farhadi’s movie is unfamiliar both in style and structure, presenting a tableau that western audiences won’t ultimately identify with at all. Firstly, it ends on a question mark, with no resolution of its central plot element. Secondly, it presents a world of courtroom bureaucracy that might be called Kafkaesque were it not for the parochial morality which is the palette from which Farhadi works.  Returning back to the larger issues that the film raises, many historically orientated movies place their emphasis on memory. The Santayana line,"those who cannot remember the past are condemned repeat it" is often the subliminal epigraph. A Separation is unique amongst modern films from any culture in that it places its emphasis on forgetting. Nader’s father, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, is an emblematic character, a kind of Tiresias whose loss of conviction holds out a perverse hope. But of what? In the sixties, it used to be called blowing your mind.