A Critical Review on the Book Secrets of Separation: Asghar Farhadi’s Cinema

In the book "Secrets of Separation: Asghar Farhadi's Cinema", Saeed Aghighi evaluates the narrative structure of Farhadi's films one by one, from his first film to The Seller. In his book, he focuses on introducing and analyzing the narrative patterns of stories and criticizing the characters in Asghar Farhadi's films, and comparing them with classical patterns and realistic modern cinema. In addition, it has a brief overview of visual elements, and principles of filmmaking, as well as some psychological and especially sociological analyses related to Asghar Farhadi's films. The lack of coherence, especially in the large volume of descriptions and the dispersion of analytical materials, in addition to technical-specialist defects, such as not observing the modern principles of book writing, the variability of written grammar, and the use of inappropriate specialized terms, along with the unscientific nature of research theories and assumptions, and Also, the lack of theoretical foundations does not raise the criticisms of this book to a level between a number of relatively good journalistic reviews and a number of incomplete expert analyses. Another problem of the book is the author's focus on the theme, narration, characterization, etc. in such a way that the content related to the visual presentation of the filmmaker does not have the necessary quantity and quality, and it does not seem to satisfy the audience looking for these topics.