The Memo | A Separation

A Separation is about a divorce – but the division that gives the film its title turns out to be only the first of a host of acute political, religious and social ​rifts at stake in its taut drama. 

Middle-class Simin and Nader are separating over the question of leaving or staying in Iran. As a result of their impending divorce, they become embroiled with a very different Tehrani couple – the devout and impoverished Razieh and Hodjat.

Riven with social and personal tensions, the situation is a tinderbox, soon terribly aflame.

The film's constant witnesses are the couples' children: 11-year-old Termeh and 3-year-old Somayeh. The girls form a gentle friendship in spite of the maelstrom around them, underscoring and complicating its fraught questions of innocence and culpability.

Their presence is poignant and ironic among – as the New York Times warned in their parental advisory note – "a lot of difficult grown-up stuff."

For Peter Bradshaw, writing in The Guardian, Simin and Nader's daughter Termeh (played by director Asghar Farhadi's own daughter, Sarina) emerges as the "central figure": "She sees everything ... Her pain and anger are all mostly hidden. But she is the person on whom a terrible, unspeakable burden is to fall".

A Separation gives us a notably disabused picture of childhood, dissecting how children interact with a complex adult world – determining it even while they try to make sense of it.

A Separation is showing as part of GROWING PAINS on TANK TV until 27 March 2020

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