Two-Thirds A Great Movie
The next time a film student says form equals content, point them to this movie. Here, they clash, unfortunately. Farhadi films in his usual deliberate, naturalistic style. Like directing a play where the main action is the story of people talking. If you're expecting things to happen, Hollywood type things, this movie is not for you. Until it is! The third act wrecks what has been up until now an aching and very sensitive movie about the effects of divorce, for an unbelievable in context melodramatic twist. Then followed by more ridiculousness as the story becomes something else entirely. The end is about an emotional connection with a character just introduced.
On the surface, this really wouldn't be bad. Alice Munro covers the same territory in her short stories. But for some reason--maybe because actual language is less conspicuous than film language--she gets away with it. Paradoxically, literary language is, in my opinion, greater in showing off its beauty, so you don't notice the contrivances she makes because the prose is good. But with film, I guess it depends on how big the contrivance is. The Bicycle Thief as an example: it's a neorealist, and it's entirely believable. But The Past in the last part is not. It feels like the director adding an impossible complication instead of trusting the very good material he already had. What could have happened in real life now feels like a movie.
And his theme of what tragedy is doesn't work here. I think this was in The Separation, too, but it was handled much more elegantly and plausibly. The idea that tragedy is the fate of good people whose actions are completely understandable yet they set off a chain reaction that seems to be determined from the start, leading, like all the cogs in a machine, to a tragedy. For example, without giving anything away, the political status of a late character was a factor, but it's ridiculous, as if Farhadi was saying the state had a hand in what happened.
Instead of the movie doing this Rube Goldberg thing, we could have had a small and thus more powerful story about divorce where nothing extraordinary happened. But no. So I guess the director is not a realist as his film making leads you to believe, but a purveyor of melodrama done in realist trappings. That's fine, but make the twist, if there must be one, a little less bombastic next time.