Capital Celluloid - Day 185: Wednesday July 6

A Separation (Farhadi, 2011): Rio Cinema 3.15, 6.00 & 8.45pm

A rare foray into new-release territory for Capital Celluloid on a quiet night on the repertory circuit in order to highlight this much-lauded new Iranian film and my local cinema.

Guardian Film have started a series of articles entitled Cine-files reviewing cinemas rather than the movies shown in them. Here's their take on the much-loved Rio.

Here, meanwhile, is an extract from the Time Out review for A Separation, a drama about the messy divorce of a middle-class Iranian couple:

'Here’s an Iranian film that plunges us into life in Tehran with an urgent sense of reality and framed by a style of handheld realism more familiar from the likes of French director Laurent Cantet’s ‘The Class’ or the best of recent Romanian cinema, such as ‘The Death of Mr Lazarescu’. It takes place over a few weeks, perhaps a few months, but it’s one of those films that tricks you into believing it’s unfolding in real time, even though what it doesn’t show – what it actively conceals – is as important to its ethically teasing dynamic as what it reveals.

A Separation’ is lively and suspenseful as both drama and debate. It employs a tricksy moral compass that swings all over the place as we see its story from various viewpoints. It prods gently at middle-class entitlement of the how-can-this-be-happening-to-me variety, but it also avoids the trap of coming down on the side of less worldly characters. If it reserves a significant amount of sympathy for anyone, it’s for the side players – the old man and the kids – to whom its gaze keeps returning, refusing to forget those outside the eye of the storm but equally bruised by it.' Dave Calhoun

Here is the trailer.