How to end a movie

Compare and contrast: ‘A Separation’ and ‘The Well Digger’s Daughter’. Two more contrasting films it would be difficult to imagine. Iranian social realism v French romantic nostalgia. True grit or soft focus. Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed both. I emerged from A Separation physically and emotionally drained; I came out of The Well Digger’s Daughter with a smile on my lips and a rosy glow on my cheeks. They are both good films and A Separation is possibly a great one. In the informal post screening debates (one of the best bits of Borderlines) there were some who said that WDD was ‘too romantic’. This is a bit like saying that grass is too green or that Ronseal does what it says on the tin. Of course it’s too romantic. It’s French! It’s romantic! What did you expect?
Where WDD may have missed a trick was in the ending, where they could have added an element of sad wistfulness without ditching any of the romanticism. WDD has now finished its run so I think I can reveal that the opportunity missed was the rather risible return of the war hero, dapper and unlined, having survived crashing his aircraft in flames behind enemy lines. In the risibility stakes, this is admittedly pretty poor fare. The moment in ‘Downton Abbey’ where the war hero leaps athletically from his wheelchair when his feeble fiancée is unable to carry the weight of a tea tray – now that’s what I call risibility. You could win a BAFTA with that.
So WDD may score modestly, risibility wise, but the fact remains that the film was just coming to a satisfactory end, with the reconciliation of divided families and fathers and daughters, when the hero returns to tie up loose ends and ensure that everyone lives happily ever after. Leave the lad in some foreign field that is forever Provence I say. The End. Fin. It’s a wrap.
Take a lesson from A Separation. No romance here, or easy answers, or you could argue no answers at all. But they knew how to end the film. It won’t spoil the film to tell you that there is a heartbreaking choice to be made at the end. After two hours of ambiguity, I (as the man in seat D5) wanted to know the answer. The movie director in me (as if) was screaming ‘end the film NOW!’ And right on queue, the credits rolled……

Melanie Walters at Resistance show, Dilwyn

Melanie Walters with Flicks in the Sticks promoter, John Gerrish, at interval of packed out Resistance show at Dilwyn Cedar Hall. Interestingly we did the Q&A halfway through the film (which had left Andrea Riseborough in mid-sentence). Melanie had had to turn down preview screenings in London and New York so her first viewing of the film was in a village hall in Herefordshire. Damn, forgot to get omelette tips.

Iran is not Japan

It’s premature to say ‘the best movie at this year’s Borderlines is…’, but I’m pretty sure that A Separation will be hard to beat. A middle class Iranian couple are embroiled in an acrimonious separation, which neither of them wants. The practical and emotional fallout of this draws in family members, colleagues and a religious working class family drafted in to look after an Alzheimer’s father. Each of the characters is forced into taking sides and to make a series of moral choices where telling the truth may have consequences that they cannot morally accept. Their lives become agonisingly entangled – a process not helped by the frequent intervention of the Iranian judiciary, who are portrayed as surprisingly liberal but hopelessly overwhelmed. The religious state is invisible but ever present. As a friend of mine heard at a meeting recently ‘there’s an elephant in the room and we need to get it on the table’.
It reminded me of Still Walking (Borderlines 2010). The films are united by the same tangled relationships, uncertainties and ambiguity, but divided by cultural differences so profound that the comparison is at best a bit odd. In the Japanese film almost everything is unspoken; emotion and feelings are portrayed by a barely raised eyebrow, an oblique phrase, a moment of silence. In the Iranian film, all is on the surface. Nothing that could be said is left unsaid.
We are often told that ‘getting it out in the open’ is a good thing. After watching A Separation, I’m not so sure.