How Does Farhadi Make the Ordinary So Intimate?

The way Asghar Farhadi builds his story world — so real, so crude, yet so quietly dramatised — never fails to move me.

For someone like me, who isn’t Iranian, I still connect instantly with his characters’ emotions. Perhaps because the core of our being is the same, irrespective of where we live. He bares that emotional core so honestly that we can’t help but see ourselves in them.

When I look at stories from my side of the world, I often fail to connect with the characters. It’s rare that we are given access to their emotional core — their honest feelings, their true selves.

Saying that a character should bare themselves completely is one thing; to make it happen through narrative is another. Because in a story, we aren’t writing a character sketch — we are following a story, and through it, we begin to see the character through the choices they make.

In Farhadi’s films, these choices are so muted, so mundane, so ordinary, that one wonders, by the end, how did I come this close to them — without them ever being loud or evident.

Maybe that’s where his honesty lies — in trusting that small, ordinary moments are enough.

— SM