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. Music does not arrive until the film is nearly over.
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.
Once you have seen it
Notice what the film does not show on the staircase. (cutting)
Safiyari cuts around the one piece of information a thriller exists to deliver. Later scenes reorganize what you thought you understood without ever supplying the missing image.
Payoff: The event is never given, only testimony about it. You cannot get behind the accounts to the thing itself. In the reading: crystalline-description. The reading calls this crystalline description: an account that builds up its object and then quietly stands in for it.
Watch Sareh Bayat's hands when Razieh is deciding. (performance)
Before she will touch the incapacitated old man, Razieh telephones a religious authority to ask whether it is permitted. Bayat plays the scruple as physical hesitation rather than as dialogue.
Payoff: Her conscience is staged as a practical problem in a room. It is the clearest thing the film shows about belief.
Look at the courtroom and the clerk's office. (staging)
Justice happens in overcrowded ordinary rooms where people stand too close, interrupt each other and wait on benches. There is no ceremony and no bench raised above anybody.
Payoff: The law appears as a crowded room of competing voices. Whose word carries depends heavily on who is speaking.
Watch the last scene and the corridor with the glass. (structure)
Termeh is asked which parent she chooses. She says she has decided, and the film leaves before you hear it. Nader and Simin wait apart, divided by a pane of glass. The score finally arrives.
Payoff: The film closes exactly where it opened: two people, a barrier, and a verdict handed to you instead of given.
Carry this in: Watch through the glass and the doorways. The film keeps you one step short of seeing anything cleanly.