Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch A Separation
2011 · Asghar Farhadi · A Separation on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how Nader and Simin talk straight into the camera. (camera)
The film opens on the couple side by side, pleading to a judge you never see. The judge sits exactly where the camera sits. Each makes a case the other cannot answer.
Payoff: You are seated in the position of the person who decides. The next two hours make that job much harder.
Notice how often you are watching through glass or doorways. (camera)
Kalari shoots handheld and composes through windows, partitions and thresholds. Bodies are half-seen, overheard from the next room, screened behind frosted panes. A clean unobstructed view of anyone is rare.
Payoff: You are made to read people rather than simply see them. Nothing here arrives as plain evidence. In the reading: the readable image (lectosign). The reading calls these lectosigns: images that have to be deciphered like documents instead of taken as plain sight.
Listen to the traffic, plumbing and overlapping argument. (sound)
There is no score for almost the whole film. The soundtrack is Tehran apartments and offices: pipes, cars, a television, people talking over each other.
Payoff: Nothing tells you how to feel about a scene. You are left to weigh each one without any instruction.
Watch where Termeh is standing during the adults' arguments. (staging)
Farhadi puts the children at the edge of every conflict: in doorways, on stairs, in the back seat of the car. Termeh watches both families and says almost nothing for long stretches.
Payoff: The child is the film's witness. Her face is where the cost of each argument gets registered.
Count how many people tell a version of events. (structure)
Nader, Simin, Razieh, Hodjat, the teacher, the neighbors. Each account is convincing on its own and incompatible with the next. Nearly everyone shades the truth to protect somebody.
Payoff: No villain is available to you. Your sympathy gets redistributed with every new account you hear. In the reading: powers of the false (puissances du faux). The reading calls this the powers of the false: honest-seeming versions that cannot all be true, with no outside proof to settle them.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch through the glass and the doorways. The film keeps you one step short of seeing anything cleanly.