A wonderful film that, while it develops an interesting problematic concerning truth and morality, is all the more worthwhile for the way in which it portrays the depth and nuance of Iranian culture. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Firoozeh: This is the better of a good deed.

Hadzi: Since when you can decide on what's good? You aren't entitled to decide what's good and what's not?

Firoozeh: Why? A five year old child can distinguish between the two.

Hadzi: Yes, this way a life is saved, but the society is not safe.

Asghar Farhadi's films are a pure joy to experience. They remind one of the potential of film to give access to aspects of life that are not one's own, to cultures and countries ones may have never visited, and to ways of thinking, moralizing, and philosophizing one could perhaps never imagine. Certainly today, so much of cinema production tries to pander to the same globalized space, forever dumbing-down cultural differences in favor of a form of image-based universal communication that incorporates difference into a superficial multiculturalism. What we get in Farhadi's films is a reminder not only of what film is capable of, but of the true diversity of culture that exists here on earth. The radically different Iranian culture, its people and their norms of behavior, its religious and legal structure is here masterfully portrayed in a way that preserves its infinite subtleties and nuance—so profound in its insight so as to seemingly give us access to the innermost dilemmas and paradoxes of its contemporary moment. One comes away from his films infinitely enriched and refreshed. They are a real gift.

Shari'a Law: Homogeneity of Culture Deepens the Social

Through Farhadi's films we begin to understand how the system of Shari'a law operates at a profound emotional level, and that the logic of these laws relate to the fundamental cohesion of society through the relationships that they engender, support, suppress or break apart. The culture we see in these films is one in which each person in society has a well defined position within it (e.g., the veiled woman and the man of the house). And each of these positions is what it is through all the social and moral codes of conduct that go along with it. Rather than a veiled woman appearing as subjugated to man (as we in the West are keen to see), we see ways in which that veil becomes a source of simple belonging, one that is implicated in a far more complex way within its culture than we might have imagined. The rigorous structuration of society according to well defined (gender) roles re-founds the entire problematic of freedom we in the West are accustomed to in an entirely new way. Independence is here asserted in radically different ways that, while perhaps appearing as subjugation at one level are revealed to be implicated in a political contestation at another, deeper level. What we see in his films is the way in which emotion propagates through this entirely other system of rationality of moral code in a kind of cultural-reflexive manner whereby a certain distribution of emotional states surrounding an event, and the interpersonal dynamics they engender, are subjected to a rationalized morality of society that then transforms these impulses, exposing the complexity of the dynamics of the entirely other sociology of Iranian culture.

What we see in these films is a culture and a social logic that is, at one and the same time, very familiar in its basic human truth (being offended, in love, disrespected) but also, as a result of its absolute consistency as strict code according to which all social interactions seem to obey, expressive of an entirely other culture. Where it seems that we in the West have long since abandoned the kind of totalizing logic and its consistency and homogeneity of culture in favor of cynicism towards authority, when one sees the world as it is reflected in Farhadi's films, one realizes that, not only is so much of the narrative surrounding Iran and Muslim countries as backward, irrational, purely theocratic and unthinking rendered fundamentally untenable, but that there is something valuable, even a desirable comfort in the certainty of the social codes of these these cultures that reflects something that we have lost in the West. The homogeneity of Iranian culture and society, rather than reaffirming the notion that other cultures can only be inferior versions of our Western secular civil society and its, perhaps, superficial conviviality, instead forces us to reflect on the possibility of radically different societal formations with the possibility of a depth of shared understanding in ordinary social-life that simply does not occur in such a way in a radically liberal multi-cultural society.

Singular Moral Predicaments Reflect the Cultural Whole

The film presents us with two competing moralities. First, there is the morality of the families paying blood money to save their friend based on what they think they must do to preserve their honor and respectability. Then, there is the morality expressed by the imam, that of the religious doctrine that says that to kill a person for the act of murder is beneficial to society and to do otherwise is corrosive to it. Which is to say that there is a more fundamental morality that has to do with deep emotion and the truth of one's life that finds itself at odds with more surface-level social morality.

The legal and religious code of Iranian society defines the avenues available to both save a life as well as to extinguish it. In the former, blood money must go to the victim commensurate to whatever money is necessary to get that person to consent to forego execution; in the latter, the blood money must go to the family of the murderer in order to carry out this final act of violence from which there is no return, that is the consequence of the victim's family insisting on the execution. In the film, it appears that, in the final sequence as we see Firoozeh through the gaps of a passing train, common morality prevails and that a life is saved. But for that to happen, 6-others are essentially sacrificed through a compromise. Is this a reasonable trade-off, in order to preserve our own immediate sense of right and wrong and live life according to whatever each of us thinks is its transcendent logic at the moment, based on whatever we think is our obligation to others? Or is there a higher morality that should govern this situation, one that frees emotion, passion, and particular truth through which the more fundamental health of social life is maintained by adhering to a longer-term notion of justice, as the Hadzi tells us?

The film does not answer this question for us definitively, it only gives us the contours of the situation that leads to the making of decisions according to the more ordinary concepts of morality that flow from cultural norms such as pride and respectability; the films gives us only a glimpse into the possibility of an alternative truth whose disavowal seems certain to leave lasting scars in these lives. It is in this way that we come to appreciate the wisdom and legitimacy of Islamic Shari'a Law as an expression of a more general condition of humanity that, whether East or West, is perpetually faced with such decisions. Rather than representing state-sanctioned murder according to a predictable Western human-rights morality, we see it here positioned within a far more complex system of justice than we could have imagined, one rendered comprehensible by necessities for social cohesion based in notions of truth and love that transcend the particularities of Iranian culture. Farhadi's films, thus, simultaneously give us insight into the profound otherness of Iranian culture at the same time that we understand our commonality as human-beings according to the fundamental truths we all must face in our own specific situations.