The Iranian filmA Separation, written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, seems to me the best film of 2011. It is one of the Academy Award nominees for Best Foreign Picture, but by any sense of justice in any nation (let alone the self-assessed greatest in the world) it would have been nominated for Best Picture before anything else. The ways in which the characters inA Separationstruggle for truth and honor, while yielding sometimes to compromise and falsehood, is not foreign to us. Few other films made last year give such a striking sense of,“Look—isn’t this life? Isn’t this our life, too?” In a complete world of film-going, we should no longer tolerate the label“foreign film,” especially since it seems likely that a film from France in which the French language remains tactfully silent is going to stroll away with Best Picture.The Artistis a pleasant soufflé, over which older Academy voters can wax nostalgic. ButA Separationis what the cinema was invented for. 

In Tehran, a married couple argue into the camera in the opening scene, trying to defend and escape from their marriage. Simin (Leila Hatami) wants to leave Iran, taking their eleven-year-old daughter with her, so that they can live in greater liberty. Nader, her husband (Peyman Maadi), is against the separation though resigned to it, but determined that the daughter stay in Tehran with him. He cannot leave, he claims, because he has to look after his father who has deteriorating Alzheimer’s. The court sides with the father, and Simin moves out of their apartment, leaving Nader, his daughter, and the victim of dementia. With a demanding job, Nader cannot manage—Simin was always at home, looking after things—so he seeks to hire a house-sitter. He finds Razieh (Sarey Bayat), a devout wife and mother who knows the pay is not enough, but her husband is unemployed and they are desperate. So she comes to the apartment every day on a long commute, bringing her own young daughter, and she finds that she has to clean the old man when he forgets to go to the bathroom.

Then one day, the old man gets out of the house and Razieh has to rescue him from dense traffic on the street. Soon after that, Razieh has to leave the apartment one day to go on an unnamed errand. She ties the old man to his bed while she is away. When Nader discovers this he is furious—this is abuse of his father. He demands that Razieh quit, and there is a minor clash between them at the door. Razieh is also pregnant and it seems that in the confusion she may have been so injured in that scuffle that she suffered a miscarriage.

That is a lot of story (though by no means the whole thing), and one of the most gripping things aboutA Separationis the way that its relentless forward action never slackens. Farhadi is nominated for his original script, and I think that’s because Academy screenwriters recognize what a masterly piece of construction this is. The film is a few minutes over two hours, and it is crammed with aspects of character and revelations in the action that require and reward close attention. Just about everyone in the picture behaves badly at times and well at others, and in every instance the plausibility of the situation is unquestioned.

At the Berlin festival of 2011, not only didA Separationwin the top prize, the Golden Bear, but the acting prizes were shared by Leila Hatami and Sareh Bayat, and by Peyman Maadi and Shahab Hosseini, who plays Razieh’s husband. My only quarrel with that decision is the omission of Sarina Farhadi (the director’s daughter) who is brilliant as the daughter, Termeh. You can say this is a demonstration of an ensemble cast, but that is only half the story. The passion and texture of the film come from the idea that existence is already an ensemble, that lives are contingent on other lives, all the time. The shooting of the film is simple and concise (it only cost $500,000) and the director does nothing to distract us from the people and their problems. You would have to say it is a realist film, yet the complexity in its relationships makes the post-war classics of Italian neo-realism seem quaint and superficial.

I will not spoil the ending for you, or the material that precedes the ending, but the movie asks the audience to make up its own mind about what could and should happen. This is where its national character becomes relevant. A Separationis in the Persian language. I have never been to Iran. But, like you, I live in a country that is steadily being taught to believe that Iran is wicked and dangerous and the probable object of justified military action. It’s worth pointing out that on the Internet there were early comments to the effect thatA Separationwould surely not be released in Iran, because it contains many elements critical of that society—like the wife wanting to leave the country for a freer life. In fact,A Separationopened in Iran months before it came to this country; it did well, and was not interfered with by authorities.

You cannot watch the film without feeling kinship with the characters and admitting their decency as well as their mistakes. The American films made this year that deal with the internal detail and difficulty of family life—likeThe Descendants—are airy, pretty and affluent compared withA Separation. With the best will in the world, George Clooney cannot discard his aura of stardom, yet the actors in the Iranian film seem caught in their characters’ traps. That point about affluence is worth dwelling on. In 2011, not many American films dealt with money and its shortage in lifelike ways. It hurtsThe Descendants, I think, that its people are so well-heeled. Yet the common experience of the nation is the desperate effort to stretch money.A Separationis full of that and it works on the assumption that the means of life are vital to the way it is lived. It is a great film, the best from last year, and a model of how films can be made. In addition, it seems a lesson in our need to look at the truth of Iran, as closely as we should have insisted on the facts about Iraq and so many other things. 

David Thomson is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder.

I write to correct some inaccuracies in Helen Vendler’srecent articleabout Tomas Tranströmer. Monica Tranströmer did indeed read out her husband’s poem“Från mars– 79” at the Nobel ceremony last December, but the English translation was not by Robin Fulton. Rather diplomatically, the translation that she read was not Fulton’s or Robert Bly’s, or Robin Robertson’s; instead, it was nearly—but not quite—that of John F. Deane. This is the English text she read:

Tired of all who come with words, words but no language

I went to the snow-covered island.

The wild does not have words.

The unwritten pages spread out on all sides!

I come upon the tracks of roe deer in the snow.

Language but no words.

Lines 4 and 5 differ very slightly from Deane’s translation, but it is morehisthan anyone else’s. Tomas and Monica Tranströmer have always been in favour of as many translations of his work as possible, and their eventual choice of which English text to read in Stockholm was clearly made with great care and sensitivity.

It may also be worth pointing out that the English-language versions printed in the Nobel program were chosen not by the Tranströmers but by the Swedish Academy.

Jonathan Galassi is president and publisher of Farrar, Straus& Giroux.

Elizabeth Warren is poised to thrash Scott Brown in their marquee U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts, and the reason is simple: Women voters love her. In themost recent poll, in December, Warren and Brown were virtually tied amongst men, but Warren led by 13 percentage points, 51 percent to 38 percent, amongst women.

Warren’s commanding lead is not about her gender (Masssachusetts has never before elected a woman to the Senate or governor’s office: Brown defeated Martha Coakley just two years ago) or even her party (the state has a history of voting for GOP moderates like Brown: Think ex-Governor Mitt Romney and, further back, Senator Ed Brooke.) Rather, she owes her ascendency to the fact that her communitarian message resonates so strongly with females.

President Obama ought to pay heed: Warren’s campaign can offer important lessons to his own. He too will need to secure women voters if he wants to earn re-election. And he, too, could do so by adopting Warren’s proud communitarian appeal.

THE PUREST DISTILLATION of the Warren message can be seen inthe video, shot back in August during her appearance at the Massachusetts home of a supporter, which went viral on the Internet and alternately met with applause amongst liberals and apoplexy amongst conservatives.

It’s easy to see why. With evident passion, Warren weighs in against George Bush’s“tax cuts for the rich” and, hands knifing the air, rejects the notion that she is stirring up“class warfare.” Not at all, she says.“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate…” It was a riveting performance that proved her skill as a retail politician, someone able to relate to regular folks—there was not a trace here of the Harvard Law professor with a specialty in bankruptcy statutes or the policy wonk whose 5,000 word treatise inDemocracyled to the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Based on such emotive fare, the conventional wisdom is that Warren’s candidacy“will test the limits of true populism,” as Greg Sargent, of“The Plum Line” inThe Washington Post, wrote. But that’s off the mark: Warren’s message is as effective as it is precisely because it goes beyond mere populism.“True populism,” in historical terms, is the crude and divisive politics of economic grievance and resentment, as embodied by the struggles of the dirt farmers against the railroad barons in the late 19^thcentury. It’s more of a sentiment than a comprehensive plan for action.

Warren’s message, by contrast, starts with righteous anger, with its pointed reference to“the rest of us,” but it doesn’t halt there. She goes on to offer an affirming brief for society. Individual opportunity, she asserts, cannot be realized without a collective marshaling of public resources. This is a wide-angled perspective that goes beyond the pedantic debates about whether and to what extent the rich pay their fair share in taxes. Her solutions-oriented emphasis is on the civic and economic infrastructure, in the broadest sense—the educational system, the transportation system, the regulatory system—that must be collectively paid for and carefully maintained to make liberal capitalism possible. This isn’t crude populism—it’s an elegant riposte to Margaret Thatcher’s famous utterance, in a 1987 television interview, that“there is no such thing as society.” Judging from the polling in Massachusetts, it also happens to be a message that’s especially attractive to women.

In that way, there are strong demographic reasons for more candidates across the United States to embrace this type of communitarianism. Women not only outnumber men among registered voters—66.6 million to 63.5 million in 2010—but also are increasingly more likely to turn out to vote. In fact, the‘turnout gap’ between women and men has grown in every election since 1980—so that in 2008, 60.4 percent of eligible women voters went to the polls, against 55.7 percent of eligible male voters,accordingto the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers. As a result, there were nearly 10 million more female than male voters in 2008, with women comprising 53 percent of the electorate. The women’s vote that year split 56 percent for Obama to 43 percent for McCain, thereby sealing Obama’s election.

But there’s no guarantee that women will support Obama this year in strong numbers. Though Obama’s lyrical campaign poetry was a powerful sway for women voters, his halting governing prose has cost him support. Polls have shown his job approval rating among women dipping below 50 percent. Women are currently more supportive of him than men, but if the President can’t reignite genuine enthusiasm among them, he stands to lose the election.

The adoption of Warren’s unabashed communitarian message could perhaps help Obama rally women to his side. It would be a smooth segue from his campaign persona of four years ago: Her variation on the theme of economic togetherness could add a bass note to his own 2008 signature call for a civic inclusiveness—for a melting away of Red America and a Blue America into a united America. That was Obama at his most inspiring, and there are plenty of Americans (women especially) who would be eager to hear him offer a refurbished and more nurturing version of that idealistic appeal, one tailored to our weary economic times.

He made a good start at channeling Warren (and their Progressive heir, Theodore Roosevelt) with his speech in December at Osawatomie, Kansas that explicitly repudiated“rugged individualism” (even while acknowledging that this sentiment is“in America’s DNA”) in favor of a society in which business titans (nearly all of whom are male) are tethered to a“broader obligation.”

But it was only a start. Communitarianism is not only about ideals, but about practical action. Obama needs to talk more about his particular policy proposals and how they link up with America’s“underlying social contract,” in Warren’s phrase. That’s perhaps the most promising way to reconnect his campaign, so far lacking in any sense of grand aspiration, with its natural demographic base.

Paul Starobin, author ofAfter America: Narratives for the Next Global Age, lives in Massachusetts.