Family Court

A Separation — which just received Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Foreign Film — is an urgently shot courtroom drama designed to put you in the jury box.

Dispensing with preliminaries, it opens at a judicial hearing where, both facing the camera that stands in for the judge, a quarrelsome husband and wife each make their case. Both are middle-class members of the Tehran intelligentsia. Simin (Leila Hatami) has finally obtained official permission for her family to move abroad, but husband Nader (Peyman Moaadi) has apparently changed his mind. He feels obligated to care for his aged, Alzheimer’s- afflicted father, and in order to leave the country, Simin is compelled to sue for divorce. Which spouse is being selfish? What’s best for their ten-year-old daughter, Termeh?

Simin’s petition is denied. (“Your problem is a small problem,” the judge concludes.)She moves in with her parents; Nader stays with his father, and Termeh does, too. Everybody is super-stressed. Without Simin, Nader needs a caretaker to look after the old man and hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a slightly younger, less educated, equally anxious woman who brings her small daughter to work with her and has taken the job without the knowledge of her devout, unemployed husband, Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini).

A Separation has already established a hectic, bustling visual style — one thing after another, mainly in medium close-up — and with all players in position, it heads directly into a real crisis. Nader comes home to find his father’s wrists tied to the bed with Razieh out on an errand. They have words; fired and (perhaps gratuitously) accused of stealing, Razieh demands her wages, is shoved out of the apartment, falls down the stairs and (Nader later discovers) winds up in the hospital. Turns out she was pregnant and has suffered a miscarriage. Thus the original case is subsumed in a larger one. Hodjat files a complaint, and, according to the law, Nader could be guilty of murder.

This is the fifth feature by Iranian writerdirector Asghar Farhadi, and he has called his movie “a detective story without any detectives” and structured events so that the viewer is compelled to mentally review a number of earlier, seemingly inconsequential events. As with the divorce proceedings, the miscarriage case is tried in a small room by a one-man judge-jury-prosecuting attorney. Largely unable to control his rage, Hodjat argues with witnesses, butts in on the questioning and, at one point, manages to get himself arrested by selfrighteously telling the judge to “fear God.” Not that this helps Nader, who is deemed guilty even by his wife (she assumes that he knew Razieh was pregnant when he pushed her)

With its two couples warring on two fronts on behalf of their offspring, A Separation is an Iranian analog to Roman Polanski’s recent parents-in-conflict drama Carnage, but the stakes are higher, the class lines sharper, the pace more grueling, and (though not confined to a single apartment like Carnage is) the action, largely played out in stairwells and hallways, more claustrophobic: Each of the four principals is trapped in (or defined by) an individual nexus of social attitudes, family obligations, financial concerns and moral beliefs that Farhadi seems disinclined to judge.

Given the adult confusion, it’s the two young children who have the clearest vision, or at least the most acute sense of the situation. What’s fascinating is how the various issues — religious or practical — are played out in these two quite different families, yet always come down to irreconcilable differences between rebellious women and their stiff-necked, controlling men. The meek and pious Razieh becomes as recalcitrant in her way — which is to say, as true to her nature — as the apparently godless Simin.

Everyone has their reasons, but not all reasons are equal. Whether as a good neo-realist or, given his own situation as a filmmaker in Iran, a canny realist, Farhadi resists the notion of narrative closure. As the great Sam Fuller wrapped up Run of the Arrow: “The end of this story will be written by you!”

Horror, Minimized

BY NICK PINKERTON

Ti West, the 34-year-old writer-director of The Innkeepers, has spent the past several years steadily toiling his way through the ranks of horror filmmaking. His little-seen apprenticeship cheapies (The Roost, Trigger Man) led to a disowned, freelance gross-out job (Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever) and then finally a name-above-thetitle breakthrough with 2009’s The House of the Devil, which showed a quantum leap in West’s control over his material and proved the thesis that, to mangle a Godardism, all you need to make a scary movie is a girl and an old building.

The Innkeepers, another marked refinement of technique that runs with the same idea, takes place almost entirely on the premises of the Yankee Pedlar, a three-story turn-of-thelast- century hotel located on what might be the Main Street of any smallish, down-on-its-heels Northeastern city. It’s the Pedlar’s last weekend of operation, and the skeleton crew of Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) is sleeping over, trading off shifts at the front desk. Since the hotel is nearly empty, however, Claire and Luke devote most of their attention not to the guests, but to investigating supernatural goings-on in the hotel. With a mike cued to EVP frequencies, the pair tries to collect solid evidence of haunting-via-suicide-case Madeline O’Malley, whose ghost Luke claims he has seen wandering the halls.

West’s Devil, which followed its female protagonist, Samantha, through an evening of housesitting, created rising tension out of banal incidents (discordant family photos, unopened doors, a pizza delivery) that weren’t particularly menacing by themselves, but imbued with sinister, uncanny implications made for a suffocating slow burn. This was fueled largely by a viewer’s teasing knowledge of horrors just outside Samantha’s view, a privileged vantage that Innkeepers does away with. In a genre lately given to gluttonous effects, West is the rare minimalist. Here, our almost complete POV identification with Claire is established early; when she puts on headphones, the soundtrack becomes muffled. Innkeepers stretches Devil’s withholding further, creating a blank canvas of non-events against which the slightest incident, like a piano key that pounds down by itself, takes on an undue significance and becomes something monumental.

Of course, something does eventually happen, but the throttling shift of The Innkeepers’ last act would be too little, too late if West hadn’t already found traction in his movie’s routine world. Paxton, the fine-featured, dimple-chinned blonde who managed to shine through the murk of the remade Last House on the Left and Shark Night 3D, gives a performance that’s spunky and charming without being cloying. The dynamic between Claire and Luke is clearly written: She’s straight out of high school, teenage sulkiness moving directly into an adult’s no-prospects despair. Luke is maybe ten years older and ten years sadder, camouflaging a hopeless crush on Claire with affected older-brotherly forbearance while she blithely overlooks it.

The Innkeepers also has a good eye for the details of crummy shift work, including a bit of nicely played physical comedy involving humping trash into a dumpster, which will be horribly familiar to service-industry vets. In another scene, Claire and Luke, beer-buzzed and bored, act out a burlesque of the hotel’s ghosts, to exorcise the tension. This bit of nosethumbing into the dark recalls a similar defiant release in Devil, where star Jocelin Donahue Jazzercised her way through foreboding corridors in a safe bubble of Walkman noise. It’s this youthful denial of vulnerability that makes West’s slow-sidling haunted-house movies work. He understands the kidding way that his audience approaches horror and seems to play along with that jokey imperviousness — until rudely tearing up the all-in-good-fun contract and gouging us with actual pain.

The Innkeepers is so loaded with false scares and cautious treading toward nothing that when freshly spilled blood suddenly flashes on the screen, the shock is really alarming, a return to the scrambling, clambering fear of death that is at the center of these silly flicks.

Stay tuned for a Westword interview with Ti West at showandtelldenver.com.