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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


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A separation(2011)

 



"In the compelling but slow-moving Iranian film A Separation, a downbeat family drama of no particular distinction gradually turns into a mystery that raises painful moral questions. There may be several guilty parties."

Un unhappily married couple break up in this complex, painful, fascinating Iranian drama by writer-director Asghar Farhadi, with explosive results that expose a network of personal and social faultlines. A Separation is a portrait of a fractured relationship and an examination of theocracy, domestic rule and the politics of sex and class – and it reveals a terrible, pervasive sadness that seems to well up through the asphalt and the brickwork. In its depiction of national alienation in Iran, it's comparable to the work of Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof. But there is a distinct western strand. The film shows a middle-class household under siege from an angry outsider; there are semi-unsolved mysteries, angry confrontations and family burdens: an ageing parent and two children from warring camps appearing to make friends. All these things surely show the influence of Michael Haneke's 2005 film Hidden. Farhadi, like Haneke, takes a scalpel to his bourgeois homeland.


These are modern people with modern problems. After 14 years of marriage, Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moaadi) want to split. They live in a flat with their intelligent, sensitive 11-year-old daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), and with Nader's elderly father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi), who suffers from Alzheimer's and is in need of constant care.




Both of them work, and, ambitious for their daughter's education, they have hired a teacher from her school to come to this crowded flat to give her extra coaching for her imminent and crucial exams. But now Simin wants to leave Iran for a country where there are more opportunities for women generally and for her daughter in particular; Nader says it is out of the question. They must stay in Iran to look after his father.
This debate has escalated into a demand for divorce.

As the movie progresses, terrible things happen in a succession of unintended consequences. Flawed people behave badly and they will make ferocious appeals to justice and to law in preliminary hearings very similar to the divorce court, heard by harassed, careworn officials oppressed by the knowledge that there is no black and white, but numberless shades of grey. Despite the angry denunciations flying back and forth and the fizzing sense of grievance being nursed on both sides, the messy, difficult truth is that both parties can be justified, that all-or-nothing judicial war will bring destruction, and that some sort of face-saving compromise will somehow have to be patched up. The women see this, but not the men.




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DP/30: A Separation, writer/director Asghar Farhadi








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Directed and written by Asghar Farhadi, A Separation is a 2011 Iranian drama that transcends its domestic setting to tell a universal story of pride, morality, and the collateral damage of dissolving relationships. It was the first Iranian film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.








  • Handheld Cinematography: The jittery, close-up camera work creates a sense of claustrophobia and urgency, making the viewer feel like a witness to a private family meltdown.

  • Absence of Score: The film has no non-diegetic music until the closing credits. This "naturalism" heightens the realism, making the drama feel like a documentary or a transcript of real life






A Separation is widely considered one of the greatest films of the 21st century. It achieved the rare feat of being both a "prestige" festival winner and a commercial success internationally.

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