What decision did the daughter make?
Very interesting movie. I loved the care taken to show how gender plays a part in modern Iranian culture and how young Iranian women are forced to make decisions about how they choose to live their lives.
The father Nader was the most interesting character to me; he was between a rock and a hard place in virtually every area of his life. He felt compelled to stay and take care of his ailing father (maintaining tradition and valuing patriarchal values over everything else), he wanted to make a good stable home for his daughter (giving her a basis of security and hope for the future), and he wanted to get along with his wife (but she seemed totally unwilling to compromise in any way). He tried to do the right thing in every area of his life, following his traditional values, but like any human, he floundered and made mistakes along the way.
His intentions were good, but at the core, did he do good? And was he a good father to his daughter? Did he live as the sort of example she needed in life?
The one time I felt Nader took a very wrong step was near the end when he put all the responsibility of whether he went to prison onto his daughter. She knew him to have lied about a very important point in his case and he knew that he had disappointed her and betrayed her trust in him as a moral, upstanding man. But then he said (and I paraphrase), "If you want me to tell them the truth, I will," knowing full well if he did, he would go to prison.
A father shouldn't put all that responsibility on a child; the decision about the fate of his life, not to mention everyone else's lives, should be his own decision and no one else's. He was responsible for the reality he had created; his daughter was not. Giving her all that power effectively put so much responsibility onto her that she would carry guilt with her for the rest of her life, no matter what her decision.
At the end, like probably everyone, as Nader and his wife waited in the waiting room of the court, I considered everything, and wondered which parent the daughter decided to go with. She didn't seem to even like her mother, and obviously preferred her father as a person, and she loved her grandfather. But the daughter never considered anything lightly, and I know her "likes" and "dislikes" wouldn't have entered into her decision. Which parent would have given her the best life? A mother who runs away from everything and denies her past when the going gets tough? Or a father who cannot give up his past because it gives him comfort to stay there?
I suppose the end of the film raisesd the question: how should the next generation of young Iranian women behave, living in a patriarchal culture which gives men most of the power in life but puts the moral onus onto the women?
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled by the last priest