100% A Separation

All Critics (63) | Top Critics (20) | Fresh (64) | Rotten (0) | DVD (2)

The film wraps us, with stunning directness, in the complex folds of its characters' passions.

A Separation is not the work of a constrained artist. It's a great movie in which the full range of human interaction seems to play itself out before our eyes.

The miracle of A Separation is that it doesn't spare any of its characters, nor does it seek to indict them. It is a democratic portrait of a theocratic world.

Tensely involving Iranian drama with niche potential.

Tense and narratively complex, formally dense and morally challenging.

A constant surprise, a film that captures the drama and suspense of real life as urgently as any picture released this year.

The audience is rocked back and forth in sympathy. . . in a tangled predicament. [N]one is one-dimensional in the superb ensemble [as] the point of view changes by minutes.

Farhadi's true focus is the flawed capacity for any law -- any form of cold rationality, period -- to address the slippery nature of human affairs. It's a frantic microcosm of life itself.

So much fun to watch that you could very nearly miss the important fact that it is also as piercing a critique of Iranian society as that country has produced in some time.

There are no heroes or villains in this story: there are only everyday figures who try their best and struggle to survive.

One of the year's most engrossing films, directed by Asghar Farhadi from his richly layered screenplay (some advice: pay particular attention to what occurs in the sequence following the opening credits)

It has an external layer that comments upon Iran's complex and seemingly unfair divorce system, as well as other social customs, but underneath it's not much more than a standard potboiler.

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/a_separation_2011/

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