The director continues to spare no effort to explore the current issues in Iran: class, modernization, equality between men and women, among which the relationship between husband and wife and the moral dilemma are the most prominent. The attack on his wife caused by moving to a new house naturally shows that the husband and wife have completely different attitudes towards the attack. Later, the husband set up a bureau to track down the perpetrator to seek revenge, but in the end, the wife chose to forgive the perpetrator. The subtle changes in the relationship between the husband and wife throughout the process are really intriguing.
If it is said that the husband's revenge from beginning to end is to maintain the dignity of chauvinism, does the wife's tolerance based on the consideration of the perpetrator's health and family situation mean another compromise to patriarchy? The director did not seem to give the final answer, but once again he happily kept the two protagonists in a moral dilemma. Especially in the final climax scene, the plot of confrontation between the people in the dilapidated old house is particularly worrying. The positions of the husband, wife, and perpetrator are in positions of uncertainty, which is like a tight stage performance.
This inevitably refers to Farhadi's resume. He first majored in drama and stage play directing, and was obsessed with writing stage plays before becoming a director. This may explain that several of his recent works have a lot of stage play styles invariably. The family quarrel scenes in "Separation Storm" and "The Past" are most obvious, and this time they are embedded in the plot of the play within the play. But this scene in the scene confuses me a lot. I haven't seen Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" before, and based on the passages in which Farhadi shows the actors' rehearsal and release, I really can't guess how this interacts or corresponds to the plot.
Despite this, the most praiseworthy thing about this film is his superb narrative skills, which is quite like Hitchcock, the master of suspense, which can make the calm life-like plot surging continuously. The part-time worker who concealed her pregnancy in "Separation Storm" and the vegetative wife who attempted suicide in "The Past" left the audience with an inexplicable sense of mystery. And the details that create the mystery in this film are even more so: the hostess of the new house who has never shown up, the door slowly opening behind my wife makes me gasp, and the banknotes and Condoms, as well as the little brother driver at the bakery, all add weird twists to the undulating storyline.
In the first two films, the director was happy to hide the description of several key scenes, allowing the audience to experience the tension of the plot in the increasingly strong suspense. This narrative technique continues to flourish in this new film. What happened in the bathroom between the wife and the perpetrator is unknown until the end, but it was like a time bomb buried in the relationship between the two husbands and wives, which eventually brought the relationship to an irretrievable end.
Equally excellent is the director's scene scheduling, especially the handling of indoor scenes is particularly wonderful. In the opening paragraph of "Storm of Separation", the portable camera moves hurriedly, vividly depicting the hidden conflicts and confrontations in a family that is about to be divided; the technique of dividing the spatial positions of characters with glass and windows is even more in this film. It can be seen everywhere, such as the scene of chatting on the rooftop at the beginning, and the scene of confrontation between people in the old house at the end. The precise scene scheduling corresponds to the spatial position of each character, and at the same time, the inner dilemma of the character is vividly displayed.
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