A Separation: visuals speak more than words!

There are few movies which remain etched in the collective conscience of its audience long after they have been watched. These movies provoke thought, elicit questions and provide no easy answers. A Separation, the Iranian film which won the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 2012 Oscars, is one such movie.

A Separation is a courageous attempt, given the circumstances of cultural and artistic repression that exist in Iran. It is a movie about a crumbling marriage between Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moaadi). Simin wants to leave the country in order to create a better life for their daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), but Nader is committed to staying back in Tehran to look after his ailing father who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. In the opening scene, the couple looks directly into the camera and pleads their case to a judge, an imaginary substitute for the audience. It is this incident that precedes the dissolution of their marriage and triggers off a series of events. 

Director Asghar Farhadi

Film trailer

Nader hires a maid named Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a deeply pious woman, to look after his father. Razieh has a young daughter and is carrying another child along the way. She works to ease the financial burden of her debt-ridden husband. However, after a fateful incident, she loses her child. Subsequently, the characters in the movie grapple with law, religion and human sentiment to find out who should be held responsible for the loss of the child. 

When A Separation is placed in the context of the Iranian New Wave, one can see a metamorphosis of this cinematic movement which began in 1969. Gone is the world of Majid Majidi, Kiarostami or Jafar Panhai, where we see reality from the redeeming and innocent eyes of children.

The director Asghar Farhadi’s camera work is to be admired and studied. The mis-en-scence is crafted to externally depict the inner conflicts of the characters. The editing of the film, with ample cut aways and jump cuts is perfect and seamless. The shots also depict the class conflict that exists in Tehran, represented by the differences in the colourful and upper-middle class apartment of Nader to the run-down and poverty-ridden residence of Razieh. 

- Parinitha Shinde

The Artist - back to the origins

The Artist won the Academy Award this year in the best film category and rightly so. It is a silent film. Well, you must define the word ‘silent’. This film recreates the humble origins of a great art form called cinema. Right from the costumes, lighting, the props to music to the intertitles (subtitles in the modern terminology) everything in this film resemble those pristine silent films.

However, there is a difference. The difference is that this silent film is made in modern times. The story, of course, revolves round a famous hero George Valentine (Jean Dujardin). He is a well known artist of silent films. However, when the talkies begin, he has this struggle to change over or move with the times. His initial resistance only adds to his miseries, as all the efforts that he makes to continue the traditional film making fails. Finally, of course, the film has a happy ending as he gets converted and moves according to times, adapting himself.

Film director - Michel Hazanavicius 

Film Clip

Is it not an irony, then, that a film with such a theme is made in the modern age and with no speech? That is where, perhaps, the director Michel Hazanavicius is making a statement. If the film indeed worked and made huge profits in an age of noisy films all over, it is a reminder to all film lovers, in the words of film theorist Rudolf Arnheim, that film is first and foremost a visual medium. It is the visuals that must convey the meaning and not so much the dialogues and the words. Words and dialogues are basically the life blood of drama.

Hopefully we shall see many more silent films in the days to come. 

- Melwyn Pinto SJ