A Separation

Leila Hatami, Peyman Moadi, and Sarina Farhadi are a broken family attempting to end a crisis in A Seperation

**** out of ****

This movie is painful. It begins with the ending of a marriage, then the trouble of caring for an aging father with Alzheimer's, and then a dispute over a possibly provoked miscarriage being handled by a legal system that is as dysfunctional as the characters.

This is a truthful drama with harsh realism. It is a movie that is important because of how many people in this world will relate to the difficulties it's characters face. It is a movie filled with characters who all have huge obstacles that come in the form of social status, honor, religion, and family. It is also very frustrating to view when it treats all of it's clashing characters with equal empathy.

I can't find many words for works of realism because the technique is almost invisible. As a foreign film, I found it a bit overwhelming because I was busy interpreting a very different culture while trying to follow the story. The angry dialogue is also so rapid-fire, that it was one of the more difficult subtitle reads I've dealt with. It was a bit challenging.

Here's Ebert's review.