Monthly Archives: May 2015

  • The Cut

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Fatih Akin (2014)

    This is only the second non-documentary feature made by Fatih Akin since The Edge of Heaven (2007).  In addition to the comedy Soul Kitchen (2009), Akin contributed an episode to New York, I Love You (2008), an anthology involving eleven directors, and made the documentary Polluting Paradise in 2012.  (I’ve seen none of these.)  The Edge of Heaven is a great film about people striving to overcome different kinds of estrangement – caused by fallings out, national borders, death – in order to be reunited or reconciled with family members.  In The Cut a young husband and father is separated from his wife and twin daughters in 1915:  he spends years and crosses continents trying to find his children.  Their themes may be superficially similar but Akin’s new film has little in common with The Edge of Heaven in terms of complexity and subtlety.  The Cut is a disappointment and it’s soon clear that it’s not going to work.   Much of the film is in English, even though few of its cast are native English speakers; Akin joins the distinguished list of film artists who don’t ‘hear’ so well when their actors are reading lines in a language that is not the director’s own.  But the shortcomings of The Cut go much deeper than that.

    Nazaret Manoogian is an Armenian, a blacksmith in the town of Mardin, now in Turkey but, at the outbreak of the First World War, part of the Ottoman Empire.  During the war years, the Ottoman government systematically expelled members of the minority Armenian community from their historic homeland; in what is now known as the ‘Armenian genocide’, many of the able-bodied male population were either murdered or died as army conscripts subjected to forced labour in appalling conditions.  Women and children, the elderly and the infirm were deported on ‘death marches’.  Nazaret is conscripted and, for much of the period of the Great War, labours on a work gang in the Mesopotamian desert.  Some members of the group die in the arduous conditions; others agree to renounce their Christianity and convert to Islam in exchange for the offer of freedom.  Of the remainder, Nazaret is the sole survivor of a massacre carried out by civilian prisoners on Ottoman military orders.  His companions’ throats are cut.  The man meant to kill Nazaret can’t bring himself to do so, although he does stab him in the neck and renders Nazaret mute as a result of the injury.  After further travails in the desert, during which he rails at and rejects God, Nazaret is given refuge by Omar Nasreddin, a soap merchant in Aleppo, whose premises eventually become a virtual refugee camp for displaced Armenians.  It’s here that Nazaret learns that, although his wife died on a death march, his twin daughters survived.  This is the start of his search for the girls, a search that takes him to many orphanages, then across the Atlantic – to Cuba, to Minneapolis and eventually to North Dakota.  There, in the mid-1920s, he’s reunited with one of his daughters, the other having died a few months previously.

    The London Film Festival catalogue not unexpectedly introduces The Cut as a film concerned with the Armenian genocide.  The genocide remains a highly controversial subject and an atrocity that some, not least in Turkey, continue to deny.  You don’t doubt its importance to Akin, born in Germany of Turkish parents, but The Cut, which he wrote with Mardik Martin (best known as the co-author of New York, New York and Raging Bull), is a verging-on-generic story – of a man whom war has separated from loved ones and who will give his all to find them again.  Nazaret’s travels allow Akin and his cinematographer Rainer Klausmann to create some fine images of various peopleless landscapes but these amount to no more than physical context and the particular circumstances that have caused the break-up of the family are merely background to a familiar central quest.  In the wartime part of the story, Akin shows little talent for marshalling crowds or even smaller numbers of people:  the Armenian prisoners in the desert often resemble a tableau and not a very vivant one – they give the impression of lining up for a group photograph.  What are clearly meant to be especially powerful moments, such as the apostasy of Nazaret’s fellow prisoners, are weak:  thanks not only to the standard issue expressions of disgust (‘You dogs …  you Judases … may you burn in hell!’) but also to the flat-footed staging.

    The lack of dynamism in these desert sequences – the fact that they look (poorly) choreographed and convey no sense of violent disorder, of things happening unaccountably – draws attention to the artificiality of the hero’s survival against the odds.  You accept that this is necessary, of course, but Tahar Rahim’s Nazaret, even in the work gang, always looks a man apart.  Later on, in Aleppo, Nazaret watches a screening of The Kid with a large audience of other refugees:  Nazaret laughs then cries at the separation of Chaplin and the little boy – there’s no suggestion at all that the plot of The Kid might be resonant for others in the audience.  Akin must see it as important that Nazaret loses the power of speech:  it’s possible that this is meant to be symbolic of an idea that the Armenian genocide has continued to be hushed up but it doesn’t pay dividends – except in one of the film’s few amusing moments when, in the soap works, Nazaret is asked questions by one of Omar Nasreddin’s employees and writes an answer on a tablet of soap, only to be told by this other man that he can’t read.  Tahar Rahim holds your attention but he’s an actor who thrives on interaction with others and there’s little scope for that in such a mechanical plot; nor, in spite of Nazaret’s globetrotting, is Rahim given any opportunity to do what he’s proved so good at doing in earlier films – realising a character who has to adapt to new situations and who turns them to his advantage.  Nazaret’s commitment to finding his daughters is so fundamental and unwavering that Rahim is also denied the chance to show hope building and withering and growing again.  He has a wonderful moment when Nazaret first encounters Omar Nasreddin in the desert, the merchant asks if he’s Armenian and the young man’s face reflects his dilemma:  if Nazaret nods his head, will he be seizing a chance of survival or condemning himself to death?  Otherwise, though, Rahim’s acting here isn’t in the same league as his work in A Prophet or Free Men or The Past or Grand Central. 

     The Edge of Heaven involved collisions between people (or near-misses) which, although they may have been improbable, were integral not just to the story but to the themes of the film.  You fully accepted these coincidences.   In The Cut, people reappear purely for ironic effect or in order to move the plot forward:  in the opening scene, Nazaret is congratulated by a customer on a piece of smithing work he’s done and we’re introduced to Nazaret’s apprentice.  The customer bumps into Nazaret when the latter is wandering in the desert; it’s the apprentice who turns up in Aleppo to tell Nazaret that his daughters have survived.  In Havana, the kindly barber who gives him lodging and explains that the girls have moved to Minneapolis also helps buy Nazaret passage to the US.  Good marriages to Cubans had been arranged for both daughters but one of the prospective husbands rejected his bride because of her limp (a physical disability inherited from the privations of the death march) and the other twin refused to go ahead with her own marriage and thereby leave her sister alone.  The barber’s wife points out to Nazaret the man who rejected his daughter; Nazaret beats the man up and steals from him enough money to pay his own way to Florida.  As the boat bound for there is about to leave, the barber says to him, ‘By the way, I forgot to ask – where did you get the money from?’  They then exchange a significant look and the barber says ‘May God bless you …’ as Nazaret sails away.  By this stage, Akin seems to be going through the motions and the final stages of the story lose what little credibility remains.  Nazaret, after being nearly beaten to death by a group of malignant Irish navvies, gets up and walks along a railway track into Ruso, North Dakota.  The first person he sees there, coming out of a house, is a limping woman.  It can’t be … but it is.  In his attempts to attract her attention, Nazaret even briefly recovers enough voice to make his daughter hear him call.  It’s really sad that The Cut, inspired by events which matter personally to the man who made it, becomes such an impersonal and phony piece of work but I hope Akin’s failure with this kind of ‘international’ project is enough to send him back to the sort of films with which he made his name – films which are smaller scale than The Cut only in logistical terms and infinitely richer in the things that matter.   The large cast includes Simon Abkarian, Makram Khoury, Trine Dyrholm and Lara Heller.  The ambitious, overly dominant score is by Alexander Hacke.

    12 October 2014

  • A Separation

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jodái-e Náder az Simin

    Asghar Farhadi (2011)

    It is at the same time a kind of whodunit (you need to be observant and remember what you saw) and a complex drama of psychology and motivation.  In a skilful balancing act, the writer-director Asghar Farhadi holds in tension the questions of what has actually happened, and – regardless of that – which of the characters you think is more or less justified in their actions and claims.  You wonder whether Farhadi will be able to sustain this tension and how things will be resolved:  he does sustain it, although I think he miscalculates in the final sequence.  (It’s a pity this comes so late because there’s no way to recover from it – and Farhadi makes matters worse by allowing the anti-climactic last scene to play on through the closing credits.)  But the journey has been deeply involving.  Along with the extraordinary documentary Senna, A Separation is the best film of 2011 so far, with moments of greatness.

    The question of who’s in the right, which runs strongly and persistently through A Separation, is there from the start.   Nader and Simin, a husband and wife in their late thirties, face the camera and put their cases to the unseen judge of an Iranian ‘family court’.  They’re a middle-class couple – he works in a bank, she’s a teacher – living in Tehran with their eleven year old daughter Termeh.  Simin wants to leave Iran for a less repressive society; Nader feels compelled to stay for the sake of his elderly father, who lives with the family and who has Alzheimer’s.  Simin wants to end their fourteen year marriage but the court rules that their circumstances don’t warrant a divorce.  So they separate[1]: Simin goes back to live with her mother. Nader hires to look after his father during the day a woman called Razieh, who’s religiously devout and badly in need of money:  her husband Hodjat suffers from depression, is out of work and deeply in debt.   The burkha-wearing Razieh, who brings her young daughter Somayeh with her to Nader’s apartment, is pregnant; and the question of whether Nader knows that becomes a crucial one.  One day Razieh leaves Nader’s father alone; his son returns to find his father unconscious, having fallen out of the bed to which Razieh had inexpertly tied him.   When she returns, they argue and Nader eventually pushes her out of the door of his apartment.  What exactly happens as a result is a matter of dispute but Razieh stumbles in the stairwell of the apartment building and has a miscarriage later that day.  If this was a result of Nader’s push and if Nader knew Razieh was pregnant he will be charged with murder.

    Nader is driving Termeh to school one day not long after the separation has begun.  They stop at a garage for petrol and the father sends his daughter to pay for it; she doesn’t get the right change and Nader sends her back.  She’s embarrassed but he insists, even though the delay means they’re holding up cars behind them in the garage queue.   Nader has no qualms keeping the other drivers waiting. Termeh eventually brings back the right money and Nader gives it to her as a reward.  This short scene is gripping in itself and a brilliant illustration in microcosm of Nader’s persistent and (as he sees it) principled intransigence.  Yet he lies when he claims he didn’t know that Razieh was pregnant and the serious, conscientious Termeh finds it increasingly impossible to deny the realisation that he’s lying.  The most tragic element in A Separation is the daughter’s loss of belief in the father – a father whom she adores and who is motivated to a great extent by love for his daughter and a desire to protect and keep hold of her.  Nader asks Termeh to tell him if she wants him to admit to the crime he’s accused of and to ‘look me in the eyes’ when she gives her answer.  She summons the courage to do that but, realising the terrible demand he’s made on her, her father looks down guiltily.   In a piercing exchange between them a little later, a weeping Termeh says to Nader, ‘You said it was nothing serious’.  ‘It got serious’, he replies.

    It seems that Razieh lies too when she claims she lost her baby as a result of Nader’s aggression.   She was already worried something was amiss with the pregnancy – that’s why she went to see a doctor and left Nader’s father tied to the bed.  Because their personal predicaments are so difficult and we sympathise with them and with their reasons for concealing the truth, the lies enlarge the characters – make them more compelling.  (A Separation calls to mind La règle du jeu – everyone has their reasons.)   Nader thinks it outrageous that he should be branded a criminal for what Razieh claims he’s done:  besides, how can he get himself locked up in jail when he’s responsible for Termeh and for his father?  The day before she left the father in the apartment, Razieh – unbeknown to Nader – was horrified to be told by Somayeh that the old man wasn’t in his room.   Razieh went out into the street looking for him and found him on the other side of a busy road.   Although we don’t see this either, it transpires that, in trying to retrieve him, Razieh got hit by a car.  That, it seems (but we can’t be sure), is where the miscarriage began.

    The person who has most at stake in being forced to address these ethical complications is Termeh:  the final drama of the film involves her having to decide, and tell the family court, whether she wants to live with her father or her mother.  It’s right that we should feel challenged to weigh things up and take sides.  (I did:  I wanted Termeh to stay with Nader.)  Yet in refusing to tell us what Termeh decides I think Farhadi confuses the two aspects of his story – human drama and moral conundrum – to which he’s given such traction in the previous two hours.  Nader and Simin sit in the corridor, outside the closed door of the office where a judge is asking Termeh to announce the decision she’s repeatedly assured him (in her parents’ presence – before they’re asked to leave the room) that she’s made.  They wonder what she’s saying to the judge and about what they’ve done to determine what she’s saying.   We’re left in suspense with them.  Farhadi is in effect saying to the audience ‘What would you do in her position?’  The question isn’t misconceived but it implies that we’ve watched A Separation purely as a questions-of-ethics exercise:  it overlooks the fact that we’ve come to care about the people in the story and that we want to know what happens to them.

    For a Western audience, it’s fascinating to see the dramatic description of ‘normal’ life in Iran that A Separation gives us.  Of course the plot is determined in crucial respects by religious and gender expectations but I found it chastening being made to realise that I assume the repressive aspects of the culture to be so dominant that people in it don’t have marital problems or parents with Alzheimer’s.  At the same time, the film presents moral dilemmas particular to this society – as when Razieh phones anxiously to ask a religious helpline if it would be a sin for her to change the old man’s pants which he’s soiled.  The insight the film gives us into the Iranian criminal justice system is absorbing.  The whole cast is excellent and Peyman Moaadi as Nader is outstanding.   He’s completely convincing as a man who’s usually able to keep things inside and, as a result, keep things going.  As well as the highly charged scenes with Termeh – played by the director’s daughter Sarina with a beautiful emotional transparency – Moaadi has two breathtaking moments with Ali-Asghar Shahbazi, who has an extraordinary blend of despair and dignity as the elderly father.   In the first of these, they’re in the bathroom of the apartment and Nader is cleaning his father up:  he leans over to sponge the old man’s back and suddenly, without our noticing the transition, he’s embracing his father and weeping.  In retaliation for the allegations she’s brought against him, Nader accuses Razieh of physically abusing his father, whom he has to take for a medical examination to prove his case.  The doctor asks Nader to undress the old man and they go into a cubicle.  The son starts to unbutton his father’s shirt and the father inclines himself slightly towards his son.  This tiny movement makes Nader realise his father’s had enough.  The doctor asks what’s happening and Nader says he thinks he’ll take his father home now.

    Each character has her or his own tempo and Farhadi’s orchestration of them is wonderful.  Sareh Bayat’s accumulating distress as Razieh is very affecting; and she is marvellously partnered by Shahab Hosseini as Hodjat, her wretchedly choleric husband.  As Simin, the lovely, fine-featured Leila Hatami has a self-assured but brittle quality that seems right for a woman thwarted in her ambitions to leave the country that she sees as hopelessly benighted.   Kimia Hosseini is Somayeh; Shirin Yazdanbakhsh is Simin’s mother; Merila Zarei is Termeh’s schoolteacher; Babak Karimi is one of the several judges in the story.  A Separation is finely photographed by Mahmoud Kalari and expertly edited by Hayedeh Safiyari.  Given the constraints on artistic self-expression in Iran, it seems a miracle this film got made at all; it’s too good to be true that it’s so true and so good.

     1 August 2011

    [1]  The film’s full title in Persian – used on the poster for its release in English-speaking countries but not on cinema listings – is Nader and Simin: A Separation.

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