“A legal battle over the care of an elderly man who suffers from incontinence” was how the BBC News website described Nader and Simin, A Separation after Asghar Farhadi’s Iranian drama scooped top honours at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale for short). It was hardly the most enticing of descriptions and, as it happens, decidedly misleading.
While there is indeed “an elderly man who suffers from incontinence” in the movie, he’s at best peripheral to the plot’s two separate legal proceedings. Instead, 38-year-old writer/ director Farhadi’s fifth feature is, as its title implies, more about the impending divorce of Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami), a middle-class Tehran couple with a 10-year-old daughter (Sarina Farhadi).
Rather than taking the expected Kramer Versus Kramer, scenes-from-the-end-of-a-marriage approach, Farhadi instead presents a steadily unfolding drama which brings in several characters from “lower” social strata. Chief among these is the devout Razieh (Sareh Bayat), employed by Nader to look after his Alzheimer’s suffering father – the “elderly man” whose health is pivotal to the ensuing events.
At once specifically Iranian – issues of religious propriety and women’s rights are crucial – and universal in its implications, Nader and Simin deals with weighty subjects of guilt, sin and redemption in disarmingly straightforward, stimulating fashion. The result is a notably well-crafted domestic drama with much wider social implications, flawlessly acted and directed with a deceptively subdued style that keeps the audience gripped for two hours.
In any year, it would surely have found consensus favour with the Berlinale jury, but 2011 wasn’t just “any” year. Iranian juror Jafar Panahi was unable to attend the event as he’s behind bars in his homeland. The writer/director is two months into a six-year prison sentence (concurrent with a 20-year ban on leaving the country and on making films) for “the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic”.
The persecution and incarceration of Panahi – and that of compatriot Mohammad Rasoulof has been a major, ongoing story in film-culture for a full year now, placing Iranian cinema squarely in the international spotlight. Given this backdrop, Nader and Simin had been identified as likely winner of the festival’s main prize, the Golden Bear – which had never before been awarded to a film from Iran – as soon as the 16-strong competition section was unveiled.
For decades ranked alongside Cannes and Venice among Europe’s big three film festivals, Berlin’s status has been increasingly wobbly since Dieter Kosslick took charge in 2002 – coinciding with the event’s centre of gravity moving from bustling West Berlin to the more sterile concrete and steel skyscraper jungle, Potsdamer Platz. The competition, in particular, has come in for sustained criticism from attending journalists, and the truncated 2011 line-up featured an unpromising paucity of established heavy-hitters.
Reportedly already turned down by both Venice and Cannes, Hungary’s miser-maestro Bela Tarr was present with what he had announced as his swansong, The Turin Horse (which ended up with the runner-up Grand Prix). But the only other internationally recognised names among the Golden Bear candidates were Miranda July from the United States, following up 2005’s art-house hit Me and You and Everyone We Know with the portentously titled The Future, and directorial debutant Ralph Fiennes with his Belgrade-shot Shakespeare adaptation Coriolanus.
This appeared to leave the field open for an Iranian coronation, Farhadi having landed the Best Director prize (a Silver Bear) for About Elly two years ago. And so it proved. Tarr and Farhadi emerged as the clear favourites among the attending critics, but the jury (headed by Isabella Rossellini) signalled clear preference by awarding Nader and Simin not only the Golden Bear, but also the Silver Bears for Best Actor and Best Actress.
Festival juries invariably “spread the love” among the various competitors, but not this time. Never before in the long history of the Berlinale has one film won three Bears. (“Where’s Goldilocks?” one wag was heard to quip after the awards.)
This remarkable sweep contributed to several fancied contenders going home empty handed. The Future, the unapologetically whimsical chronicle of a fey Los Angeles’ couple’s sort of break-up (starring July herself), proved much more popular with audiences than critics. In its creation and exploration of a self-contained, amusingly off-kilter cinematic universe, The Future marks a huge step forward July’s much-garlanded debut, confirming her as a high calibre, uncompromisingly idiosyncratic comedienne in the Elaine May Victoria Wood mould. Of all the Berlinale 2011 competition films, this may well prove to be the biggest box office draw.
Aiming at a somewhat older demographic, Fiennes’ muscular Coriolanus – in which a Roman general scales the political ladder in controversially undemocratic style – is marked by some fine performances, notably from Vanessa Redgrave as the eponymous anti-hero’s mother and Brian Cox as his wise-owl friend-cum-mentor. But the biggest scene-stealers are the Serbian and Montegrin locations, many of the urban and rural backdrops still showing evidence of recent conflicts.
For all its testosterone and gore, Coriolanus couldn’t help but look somewhat anaemic alongside what was for me the outstanding highlight of the entire festival, although it proved so divisive and polarising that any kind of jury recognition was always unlikely. This was Innocent Saturday, a visceral evocation of the fateful late-April day in 1986 when the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded, with hyper-kinetic hand-held camerawork from Romania’s outstanding cinematographer Oleg Mutu (also responsible for Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days.)
Mutu and director Alexander Mindadze, best known as a scriptwriter before making a belated behind the camera debut with 2007’s Soar, follow events from the perspective of young Communist Party official Valery (Anton Shagin), who accidentally becomes privy to goings-on in the reactor before Saturday’s dawn. For the next 24 hours, we’re on his shoulder almost constantly as he (initially) tries to flee, along with his on-off girlfriend Vera (Svetlana Smirnova-Marcinkevic), only to miss the train by a matter of seconds. The pair then make a detour to a triple-wedding celebration, where Valery ends up on stage playing drums with his former bandmates in an extended, tour-de-force section that has the barrelling force of the most intense nightmares.
This sequence of astonishing, noisy immediacy is the centrepiece and highlight of a film which could be summed up as an art-house variant of Cloverfield, with the radiation-spewing reactor taking the place of that picture’s rampaging monster.
As “slow cinema” has now (regrettably) become the default mode of high-end cinematic expression worldwide, how utterly bracing to come across such a fast, engaging, propulsive and irresistibly dynamic approach to such a deadly-serious issue – a film which has fascinating allegorical and symbolic interpretations of social structures and practices in the Soviet era.
