a separation

Any film — great or awful, silly or serious — that is attuned to its national climate will have some way of leaving its foreign viewers in the dark, and while one of the more significant effects of instant-access education is a tearing down of certain cultural barriers that would’ve otherwise required an expert to decipher, we still fail to catch everything. It’s sometimes the case that we don’t even recognize a thing as being there.

As a great admirer of Asghar Farhadi‘s cinema and, in particular, his 2011 masterwork A Separationamong our favorites of this decade — I’m especially excited when social codes and historical contexts, however small, are baked into his latest knotty narrative. You can understand, then, how and why I was pleased when viewing Digging Deeper‘s video essay concerning the particular importance of colors and barriers in this film; while the latter’s a bit more obvious as an area of study — it is called A Separation, after all — the level of insight brought to the former is rather eye-opening. It also speaks awfully well to what Farhadi achieved here. How many movies inspire this sort of discourse even five years into their lifespan?

Have a look below:

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