The Principle
Asghar Farhadi makes films in which everyone is telling the truth and no one is telling the whole truth. His cinema is built on a deceptively simple premise: place ordinary people in situations where their legitimate needs, beliefs, and moral convictions come into direct, irreconcilable conflict, and then refuse to tell the audience who is right. The result is a body of work that functions as moral philosophy — not philosophy argued in dialogue but philosophy experienced in the body, as the audience's sympathies shift and reverse with each new revelation, each new perspective, each new piece of information that reframes everything they thought they understood.
In A Separation, a middle-class couple's decision to divorce sets in motion a chain of events involving a working-class caretaker, her disabled father-in-law, and a legal system that cannot accommodate the complexity of what has happened. The husband is right to want to care for his father. The wife is right to want to leave Iran for their daughter's future. The caretaker is right to seek justice for the harm done to her. The daughter is right to be devastated by the choices the adults are making. Every character acts from genuine moral conviction, and every character's actions cause genuine harm to the others. There is no villain, no hero, no one the audience can comfortably judge from the outside. There is only the irreducible complexity of human moral life, rendered with a clarity and compassion that makes A Separation one of the greatest films of the twenty-first century.
Farhadi achieves this moral complexity through a narrative method that is as rigorous as it is deceptive. His films appear to be straightforward domestic dramas — they are set in apartments and houses, they deal with marriages and families, they use naturalistic dialogue and performances. But beneath this naturalistic surface, Farhadi constructs narratives of extraordinary intricacy, in which information is withheld, released, and recontextualized with the precision of a mystery writer. The audience is constantly learning new facts that change the meaning of facts they already knew. A gesture that seemed innocent in scene three is revealed as calculating in scene twelve. A lie that seemed selfish in the first act is revealed as protective in the third. Farhadi does not manipulate the audience — he educates them, incrementally, in the impossibility of simple moral judgment.
The Architecture of Moral Ambiguity
The Central Dilemma
Every Farhadi film is organized around a central moral dilemma that admits no satisfactory resolution. In A Separation, the question is: who is responsible for the harm done to the caretaker and her unborn child? In About Elly, the question is: who is responsible for a young woman's disappearance during a group outing? In The Salesman, the question is: what is the right response to an act of violation against one's wife? In A Hero, the question is: is a man who returns found money genuinely good, or is he manipulating public perception for his own benefit?
These dilemmas share a common structure: they begin as apparently simple moral situations and become progressively more complex as new information is introduced. In A Separation, the initial situation — a husband and wife disagree about emigration — seems like a straightforward domestic conflict. But as the film progresses, layers of class difference, religious conviction, patriarchal authority, legal technicality, and personal history accumulate until the original conflict is submerged beneath a moral complexity that no legal system, no religious authority, and no amount of good will can untangle.
The power of Farhadi's dilemmas lies in their specificity. They are not thought experiments or philosophical abstractions — they are situations that arise from the particular circumstances of particular people in a particular society. But the specificity produces universality: anyone who has ever been caught between competing moral obligations, between the truth and the need to protect someone, between justice and mercy, recognizes the territory of a Farhadi film. The Iranian setting is not exotic or alienating — it is the specific ground from which universal human experience grows.
Layered Revelation
Farhadi's narrative method depends on the strategic withholding and releasing of information. He does not conceal facts from the audience through trickery or unreliable narration. Instead, he structures the narrative so that the audience experiences events from one perspective before being shown the same events from another. In A Separation, we initially see the confrontation between Nader and Razieh from Nader's perspective, and we form a judgment based on what we see. Later, we learn facts that Nader knew and we did not, and our judgment shifts. Later still, we learn facts that Razieh knew, and our judgment shifts again. Each shift is not a reversal but a deepening — we do not change our minds so much as we discover that our minds were not adequate to the complexity of the situation.
This technique of layered revelation serves a moral purpose that goes beyond narrative entertainment. By showing the audience the process of their own moral reasoning — by making visible the way new information changes old conclusions — Farhadi demonstrates that moral judgment is always provisional, always based on incomplete information, always subject to revision. The experience of watching a Farhadi film is the experience of learning humility about one's own capacity for judgment.
The Lie as Survival
Characters in Farhadi films lie. They lie frequently, skillfully, and for reasons that are always, from their own perspective, justified. In A Separation, Nader lies to the police about what he knew when he pushed Razieh. Razieh lies about whether she called Nader's house. Simin lies by omission when she does not reveal what she knows. These lies are not signs of moral failure — they are survival strategies, ways of navigating a situation in which the truth is too dangerous, too complex, or too damaging to be told whole.
Farhadi treats these lies with the same moral seriousness he brings to everything else. He does not condone them, but he understands them, and he makes the audience understand them too. When we watch a character lie, we feel both the wrongness of the lie and the impossibility of the truth, and we recognize in ourselves the same capacity for strategic deception that the characters display. Farhadi's cinema is, among other things, a sustained meditation on the relationship between truth and survival, on the question of whether complete honesty is always possible or desirable in a world where competing obligations make the whole truth dangerous.
Domestic Space as Moral Arena
The Apartment as World
Farhadi's films are set primarily in apartments and houses — domestic spaces that become, through his direction, as dramatically potent as any battlefield or courtroom. The apartment in A Separation — with its hallways, its closed doors, its rooms where private conversations can be overheard — is not merely a setting but an active participant in the drama. The layout of the space determines who can see what, who can hear what, who knows what. When Nader argues with Razieh in the hallway while his daughter listens from the bedroom and his father sits uncomprehending in the living room, the architecture of the apartment creates the architecture of the scene — multiple characters in multiple rooms, each with a different level of knowledge, each experiencing the same event differently.
Farhadi's domestic spaces are always shown in their lived reality — cluttered, specific, bearing the marks of daily life. The furniture, the objects on shelves, the food on tables — these details are not production design in the conventional sense. They are the material conditions within which moral life unfolds. The class difference between Nader's middle-class apartment and Razieh's working-class home is communicated not through dialogue but through the visible texture of their domestic environments.
The Car as Confessional
A distinctive feature of Farhadi's films is the use of car interiors as spaces for crucial conversations. Characters talk in cars because cars provide privacy in a society where privacy is scarce, because the enclosed space creates intimacy and pressure, and because driving provides a physical activity that makes difficult conversations slightly more bearable. The car scenes in A Separation, The Past, and The Salesman are among the most emotionally intense in the films — two people in an enclosed space, facing forward rather than facing each other, speaking truths that they cannot speak anywhere else.
Performance: Naturalism Under Pressure
The Extended Argument
Farhadi's films are built around extended argument scenes — conversations that escalate from controlled disagreement into raw, desperate confrontation. These scenes are Farhadi's dramatic set pieces, and they are among the most intense in contemporary cinema. In A Separation, the courtroom scenes between Nader and Razieh, mediated by a magistrate, are masterpieces of escalating tension — each character defending their version of events with increasing desperation, each revelation tightening the moral noose around all parties.
These argument scenes require performances of extraordinary naturalism and emotional range. Farhadi casts actors who can sustain long scenes of verbal and emotional combat without losing either the thread of the argument or the emotional truth of the moment. The performances must be simultaneously strategic and sincere — characters are always performing for the other characters (arguing a case, defending a position, concealing a weakness), but the emotions driving the performance must be genuine.
Overlapping Dialogue and Physical Agitation
Farhadi's dialogue scenes are characterized by overlapping speech, interruptions, and incomplete sentences. Characters do not wait politely for each other to finish — they talk over each other, cut each other off, finish each other's sentences, and leave their own sentences unfinished. This overlapping quality creates a sonic texture of urgency and desperation that mirrors the moral pressure of the situations the characters are navigating.
Physical agitation accompanies verbal agitation. Characters in Farhadi films pace, gesture, stand up, sit down, leave the room, and come back. They pick up objects and put them down. They pour tea they do not drink. These physical behaviors are not actorly tics — they are the body's response to moral and emotional pressure, and Farhadi directs them with the same attention he gives to dialogue. The body cannot lie as effectively as the mouth, and the audience reads the truth of a scene in the characters' physical behavior as much as in their words.
The Child as Moral Witness
Children play crucial roles in Farhadi's films — not as sentimental objects but as moral witnesses whose presence raises the stakes of every adult decision. In A Separation, Nader and Simin's daughter Termeh is forced to choose between her parents, and her presence in scenes of adult conflict creates an additional layer of moral pressure. In The Salesman, the couple's unborn child is an invisible but constant presence that shapes every decision. Children in Farhadi cannot be deceived as easily as adults, and their clear-eyed observation of adult behavior serves as a moral mirror that the adults cannot avoid.
Camera and Editing: The Restless Observer
The Searching Camera
Farhadi's camera is never static. Even in dialogue scenes, the camera makes small, almost imperceptible adjustments — slight pans, tiny reframings, subtle shifts of focus — that create the impression of an alert, searching observer trying to understand what is happening. This restless movement is not handheld volatility — it is the visual equivalent of close attention, of a consciousness that is following the moral argument of the scene with the same intensity as the audience.
In group scenes, the camera's searching quality becomes more pronounced. It pans from face to face, catching reactions, following the flow of attention and power within the group. When a character says something that changes the dynamic of the scene, the camera moves to catch the reactions of the other characters — not in cutaway but in continuous movement, as if the camera and the audience are in the room, turning their heads to follow the action.
The Revelation Cut
Farhadi uses a specific editing technique that might be called the "revelation cut" — a cut that reveals a piece of information previously hidden by the camera's framing. A conversation appears to be between two people until a cut reveals that a third person has been listening. A room appears to be empty until a cut shows someone standing just outside the frame. These revelation cuts mirror the film's larger strategy of layered revelation — they show the audience that what they thought they were seeing was incomplete, that there was always more to the scene than they knew.
Long Takes for Confrontation
Farhadi's most intense confrontation scenes are often filmed in extended takes that refuse to give the audience the relief of a cut. In A Separation, the courtroom scenes unfold in takes that last several minutes, the camera panning between the parties as the argument intensifies. The extended take creates a sense of entrapment — the audience cannot escape the scene any more than the characters can, and the accumulating pressure of the unbroken take mirrors the accumulating moral pressure of the situation.
Iranian Society as Universal Ground
The Specific and the Universal
Farhadi's films are deeply rooted in the specific conditions of contemporary Iranian society — its class structure, its legal system, its religious conventions, its gender dynamics, its relationship to modernity and tradition. But these specifics are never presented as exotic or educational. They are simply the ground on which universal human dramas play out. The audience does not need to understand Iranian law to feel the injustice of A Separation's legal proceedings. They do not need to know about Iranian gender norms to feel the impossible pressure on Rana in The Salesman. The specific conditions create the dramatic situation, but the emotional and moral experience is accessible to anyone who has ever been caught between truth and survival, justice and mercy, love and self-preservation.
Class and Power
Class difference is a persistent structural element in Farhadi's films. In A Separation, the conflict between Nader (middle-class, educated, secular-leaning) and Razieh (working-class, devout, financially desperate) cannot be separated from the class dynamics that shape their encounter. Razieh's religiosity is not merely a character trait — it is a function of her social position, a source of moral authority in a world where economic authority is denied her. Nader's rationalism is not merely a philosophical stance — it is a privilege of education and economic security. Farhadi does not reduce his characters to class positions, but he never allows the audience to forget that moral dilemmas do not exist in a social vacuum.
Writing/Directing Specifications
- Construct the narrative around a central moral dilemma that has no satisfactory resolution. The dilemma should arise from the legitimate, understandable, and mutually exclusive needs of multiple characters. Every character's position should be defensible from their own perspective. The audience should find it impossible to identify a "right" answer without doing violence to at least one character's legitimate claim.
- Withhold and release information in layers that progressively deepen moral complexity. The audience should form judgments based on partial information, then receive new information that complicates or reverses those judgments. This process should repeat multiple times, each revelation adding a new dimension to the moral situation rather than simplifying it. The audience should experience the provisionality of their own moral reasoning.
- Write characters who lie for reasons that are, from their own perspective, morally justified. Every lie in the film should be simultaneously wrong and understandable. The audience should feel both the wrongness of deception and the impossibility of complete honesty in a world where competing obligations make the whole truth dangerous. The lies should not be signs of villainy but strategies of survival.
- Set the primary action in domestic spaces whose architecture shapes the drama. Apartments, houses, and cars should function as more than settings — their layouts should determine who knows what, who can hear whom, who is included and who is excluded. The physical space of the domestic environment should be a dramatic agent, creating the conditions of privacy, surveillance, and confrontation that drive the plot.
- Direct extended argument scenes as the film's dramatic centerpieces. These scenes should escalate from controlled disagreement to raw confrontation through a logic of accumulating pressure. Dialogue should overlap, characters should interrupt each other, and physical agitation should mirror verbal intensity. Film these scenes in long takes that deny the audience the relief of a cut.
- Include children as moral witnesses whose presence raises the stakes of adult decisions. Children should observe adult conflict with an attentiveness that the adults cannot ignore, and the adults' awareness of being observed by their children should add an additional layer of moral pressure to every decision. The child's perspective should not be sentimental — it should be clear-eyed and uncomfortable.
- Use a restless, searching camera that mirrors the audience's moral attention. Even in static scenes, the camera should make small adjustments — slight pans, reframings, shifts of focus — that create the impression of active observation. In group scenes, the camera should follow the flow of power and attention within the room, turning to catch reactions and registrations that reveal the moral subtext of the conversation.
- Embed class dynamics as structural elements of the moral dilemma. The characters' economic positions, educational backgrounds, and social status should shape their moral options without determining their moral character. Class should be visible in the texture of domestic environments, in the language characters use, and in the resources available to them in moments of crisis.
- Maintain naturalistic surface while constructing intricate underlying narrative architecture. The film should appear to be a straightforward domestic drama while operating, beneath the surface, as a precisely engineered moral mechanism. Every scene should serve multiple functions — advancing plot, deepening character, introducing or recontextualizing information, and shifting the audience's sympathies. The intricacy should be invisible on first viewing and revelatory on second.
- End with a decision that the audience must make, not the film. The final scene should present a choice — a character poised between two options, a question asked that the film does not answer, a judgment that the audience must render without sufficient information. The film should end not with resolution but with the recognition that resolution is impossible, that moral life is a continuous process of making inadequate decisions with incomplete knowledge, and that this condition is not a problem to be solved but the fundamental nature of human existence.