Features » Shaken and stirred
Posted January 23, 2012 7:01 pm by Dr Noze
Posted under: Events, Reviews
You’re unlikely to see a better film than the one screened at the Attfield theatre last Saturday.
Short on laughs, but long on breathtaking twists and turns, A Separation takes us amongst people who are like us, but live in a culture half a world away.
An educated, westernized family’s troubles bring them into contact with a family from Teheran’s workless poor. We know we are in a different universe when Razieh, left to nurse the richer family’s demented elderly relative who has wet his pants, has to pause to telephone a mullah so that she can check whether it is a sin to change him.
It all starts when educated Simin wants her family to leave the miseries of Iran and work abroad, offering their 11 year old daughter wider horizons. But her husband, Nader, stubbornly insists on staying to care for his demented father. To force a resolution, Simin leaves home to live with her parents.
Nader employs Razieh – with the hotline to the mullah – as a nurse while he is at work. But her life is complicated, too, and the old man ends up alone, collapsed, tied to a bed. As this is a story where everyone sometimes does the right thing, and sometimes does the wrong thing, we can’t really blame her. The only one who sees the whole picture with any clarity is Termeh, the well-off couple’s daughter. She sees – amongst other things – her father lose his integrity as he defends himself against a murder charge, while her family is broken in pieces by the sheer complexity of events.
This is just the latest in a long list of riveting films screened in Oswestry by Kinokulture. You will have to travel a long way to see one more memorable than this.
A great review of a brilliantly written, directed and acted film. If you missed it in Oswestry ‘A Separation’ is screening as part of the Borderlines Film Festival on 24th Feb at The Market theatre, Ledbury and on 29th Feb at St Mary’s Church Hall, Ross. The full Borderlines programme can be viewed here: http://www.borderlinesfilmfestival.org