From a HuffPost Post-50 blogger:

For example: Many married couples want to set things up so that the surviving spouse gets everything and then when the surviving spouse dies, it all gets left to their children. But what if Dad remarries after Mom dies and then is outlived by his new wife? Should that new wife be allowed to live in the family house until her death — thus delaying when the adult children can realize it as an asset?  What if Wife 2 devoted herself to caring for Dad, keeping him out of a nursing home and protecting the family’s other cash assets by doing so? Still ready to put her in the street?

Last night I went to see this Oscar-winning Iranian film about a married couple divorcing, their 11 year old daughter, the husband’s father with dementia, and another family with whom they become entangled.

It was a sprawling puzzle of a film, a 120 minute peek behind the curtain of contemporary urban Iran that left me with many questions and some frustration. On a narrative level, the wife’s story about why she wanted to leave her husband was never well-developed, leaving her character looking increasingly cold and unsympathetic. The husband was well played as a prideful yet compassionate man capable of great tenderness with his Alzheimer’s-suffering father and devoted paternal concern about his 11 year old daughter, particularly about her education.

In one sense this seems to be a film about obligations, felt and imposed, for the care of others and how obligations–such as to your ill father and your minor child–can come into conflict.

The film was also a sobering treatment of caregiving for an increasingly debilitated elder, a person losing functions such as bowel control or speech day by day; a man becoming increasingly like an infant, in terms of how he can care for himself, but an infant who weighs more than his grown son, and whose grown son is struggling to care for him in a well-appointed but nonetheless cramped apartment in a walk-up building located on a steep hill with crazy traffic. Early in the film the wife says to the husband, “But he doesn’t even know you are his son.” The son replies, “But I know he is my father.”

Finally, the film presents a harrowing picture of how middle-class divorce might happen in developing nations that have not yet achieved even “good” divorce standards, such as not asking children to stand alone and tell a judge which parent they choose to live with. The late professor Don Browning in his book Marriage and Modernization addressed the question of how rising divorce rates outside the relatively affluent west will play out in the decades to come. If A Separation is any indication, it will be heartbreaking.