In his office, there’s little attempt to maintain decorum: the characters stand and yell at each other, and are only restrained, as Hodjat is, when their anger threatens to spill over into violence.
The weary man who questions them is an investigator. But in all the other courtroom scenes-the scenes where Nader, Razieh, and Razieh’s husband, Hodjat, argue over the shove and the miscarriage-take place in the preliminary investigation stage. In these scenes, we’re in civil court, and the voices are judges. With Ayatollah Khomeini came the return of Islamic law, which was blended, somewhat uneasily, with the inquisitorial approach already in place, and that’s the system we see in action in “A Separation.”Īt the beginning of the film, an offscreen voice questions Nader and his wife, Simin, about their application for divorce, and at the end of the film, a voice asks their daughter, Termeh, to choose which parent she wants to go with. In the pre-revolutionary era, the Iranian leader Reza Shah had instituted a French-style inquisitorial legal system (as opposed to the British-style adversarial system), and closed the religious courts. Who is the beleaguered man with the salt-and-pepper beard who interrogates the accusers and accused? Why aren’t there any lawyers around? What kind of a crime is miscarriage, anyway? And how is it decided that such a crime can be settled with money?įor answers, I turned to Sanaz Alasti, an Iranian lawyer and professor of criminal justice at Texas’s Lamar University, and author of the book “Cruel and Unusual Punishment: Comparative Perspective in International Conventions, the United States and Iran.” First, she said, it’s important to know that Iran’s legal system is a hybrid of civil law and sharia law (specifically, the Twelver Shia version). Though the characters’ awful dilemmas are always wrenchingly clear, the film’s courtroom scenes leave some questions. They argue, he pushes her out of his apartment, and he is accused of causing the miscarriage of her baby and charged with murder. The plot is intricate, but here’s the legal brief: After a man called Nader separates from his wife, he hires Razieh, the sister-in-law of a family acquaintance, to care for his elderly father, but fires her after she leaves the father unattended.
0 kommentar(er)
