Day 4: September 11

In the opening scene of A Separation, Asghar Farhadi elucidates, in one long take of rapidfire dialogue, what some sources purport to be the entirety of the film’s plot. Simin (Leila Hatami), determined to send daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi) to a good school, demands and is refused a separation from her husband Nader (Peyman Moaadi), who must tend to his ailing father. What follows, although staged with stunning clarity, is so complex I couldn’t spoil it if I tried: the intrusion of another, more financially vulnerable couple into Nader and Simin’s lives spurs a whirlwind of accusations, pushing Simin’s concerns to the sidelines. (A legal aide’s reference to Simin’s ambitions as a “small issue” is cruel, but the film proceeds to treat them exactly so so.) The film suffers slightly only for deferring Simin and Termeh’s roles for so long; still, the threads are interwoven brilliantly, as when a deftly staged showdown between Nader and Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), the volatile husband of the separating couple’s caretaker Razieh (Sareh Bayat), draws attention so fully to the men’s underhanded dealings that their seismic effects on both relationships are altogether eclipsed. Farhadi’s greatest achievement is a near-complete obfuscation of where his own feelings lie: I defy anyone to identify any of these characters, albeit deeply sympathetic, as aligned with the filmmaker. B+

Nixing his pet subjects of rape and pedophilia, Dark Horse has been touted as tame by Todd Solondz’s rather lax standards. But this freeform outpour of misanthropy is as bountifully negative as ever. Taken as a character study, it’s bold but unpersuasive. Richard (Justin Bartha) is simple-minded dork of the fanboy genus, cynical but skilled at appearing otherwise; when he proposes to artsy, depressive Miranda (Selma Blair), it’s his dreams vs. her self-respect. While Richard and Miranda are a blatantly bad fit, Richard’s therapist’s way of putting it is “She’s too good for you”; while Richard compulsively buys action figures at work, he prides himself on being not that nerdy. But Solondz somehow lacks the nuance required to make these contradictions important. He instead shunts Richard and Miranda’s sacrifices aside in favor of an oneiric tailspin into self-loathing, his anything-to-get-a-laugh side reigning supreme. C+

Karim Ainouz is in top form with The Silver Cliff before much of anything happens. Djalma (Otto Jr.) languidly hangs out in downtown, fucks wife Violeta (Alessandra Negrini), and performs mundane parental tasks; Ainouz has no default setup, utilizing a variety of visual approaches, but tends to shift emphasis or phase it out entirely in the course of a shot. Then something big happens, Violeta becomes the true protagonist, and Silver Cliff begins to resemble a Radu Muntean movie in focus if not style, especially Tuesday After Christmas. The middle section’s highlights are Violeta’s slyest forms of emotional masochism: prioritizing rechecking her cell over her dentistry job, allowing herself indifference following a gory bike accident, replaying a traumatic voicemail before hitting the club. There’s only so much the movie can do, however, after blanketing her misery in oblivion. When Violeta listens to a cabbie recite a comparable story and vaguely discloses bits of her own, the movie hits a mundane spot between openness and dissimulation. But things pick up a bit as she ambles with single dad Nassir (Thiago Martins), whose awkwardness has a true, lovely ring. B-

Previous entries in Alexander Sokurov’s “Tetralogy of Power” didn’t exactly locate what was human in Hitler, Hirohito and Lenin so much as behavior so eccentric that good and evil were no longer applicable. Faust proves Sokurov incapable of a conventional emotion, or, I fear, a fully comprehensible one. Much of the film juxtaposes Faust’s (Johannes Zeiler) despair and bad health with sexual and sadistic pleasure, like an ascetic philosopher making sense of a Fellini cavalcade. Sokurov assigns even minor characters a madness that makes direct communication impossible, rendering Faust riveting moment-to-moment and inert across any given scene. Throughout, Satan (Anton Adasinskiy), here embodying converse extremes of human ugliness, both lanky and dense with flab, pursues Faust, and Faust pursues Margarete (Isolde Dychauk), the pretty sister of a slain soldier who still allows herself pleasure in the wake of her brother’s death. In an extraordinary display of Sokurov’s control over the 4:3 frame, Margarete’s grieving, although effusive, comically pales next to her mother’s—a gesture that, like many in Faust, undoes its own meaning. B