Time and Character in Asghar Farhadi's A Seperation

Narrative or what Gerard Genette calls discourse is a fundamental aspect of any text to be studied. Since there have been a little structural study on Iranian cinema, this article attempts to present a structural pattern of a triumphant Iranian movie and scrutinize its narrative structure. Asghar Farhadi is one of the most successful Iranian directors in recent years. Most of his late movies have gained lots of international prizes and praised by famous critics along the world. A Separation )2011( is the first Iranian drama film to ever win the Oscar prize. It focuses on an Iranian middle-class couple who separate, and the conflicts that arise when the husband hires a lower-class caregiver for his elderly father, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. It also won the Golden Bear for Best Film and the Silver Bears for Best Actress and Best Actor at the 61st Berlin International Film Festival, becoming the first Iranian film to win the Golden Bear. It also won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, making it the first non-English film in five years to achieve this. It is among the ten most popular movies and bestsellers in Iran. The narrative structure of this movie has been studied according to the theories of Gerard Genette and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan. Genette discusses time and studies it in the relation between story and text. He introduces three concepts of “order”, “duration” and “frequency” to evaluate this relation. According to Genette, “order” is the relation between the time of the story and that of the text or discourse. He defines “duration” as the relation between the time the events are supposed to have taken to occur and the amount of text devoted to their narration. Under “frequency”, he discusses the relation between the number of times an event happens in the story and the number of times it is narrated in the text. Next, Rimmon-Kenan’s theory of characterization in narrative has been applied to A Separation. Rimmon-Kenan classifies and explains different ways of characterization narrative which are “direct definition” and “indirect representation”. According to her indirect representation happens through action, speech, external appearance, environment and analogy. This research reveals that talking about order, there is no anachronies in the text except one which creates the plot’s main crisis. This linear relationship between story and text serves for the realist genre of the movie. Duration of the text is also at the service of creating a realist atmosphere, most the important scenes of the movie have the “scene” type of duration that means they have given the same times as that of the story. Frequency is also singulative in most parts of the text, except where there is a need for emphasis on one. Characterization analysis also shows that the indirect representation dominates the characterization in the narrative. Moreover, among various techniques of indirect representation; action, speech and analogy are used in this text.