A Separation (2011)

Watching Asghar Farhadi's A Separation in the present cultural moment is a bracing exercise, akin to handling a well-made tool from a vanished trade. The film, which took the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2012, concerns an Iranian couple who cannot agree on whether to emigrate. He stays to look after his father, who has Alzheimer's. She moves out. A caregiver from a distant, poorer suburb is hired, a miscarriage occurs, and the back half of the film unfolds in courtrooms where every character tells a slightly different version of the truth. It is immaculately constructed, and it is about almost nothing that the current machinery of cultural evaluation is built to detect.

The film depicts class friction without framing it as a verdict on capital. It places a devout woman at the center without converting her into a thesis. It shows a man broken by unemployment and debt, and it does not hand him a speech about the system that broke him. The Alzheimer's is a practical burden and a plot engine, not a platform. The cast is entirely Iranian, and the film never pauses to congratulate itself on that fact. There is no moment in which anyone explains the moral of the story to anyone else, which is a startling thing to encounter now.

What remains is craft, ambiguity, and a set of characters who are each correct and each wrong. No sermon arrives. Nobody is redeemed by an argument. The film simply observes, and trusts us to keep up. It is a masterpiece, and it is entirely silent on every subject the age has decided is urgent.