It might be stretching it a bit far but I do like Lobby's reading. The mom represents a kind of modernity and the father a traditionalism, using the sick grandfather (Iran) as an excuse to not move on with their life. There's stuff going on beneath the plot of A Separation.
Yay, at last someone who agrees with me!
I found this to be the film's central theme, which was especially a focal point in the classroom scene near the end when the two women meet to find a solution. One has her garb off, the other worries about money linked to bad juju. It's a central theme in Islamic countries, especially one such as Iran where there has always been an undercurrent of secularism after the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
I'm shocked that anyone could take this film as shallow (and not just you, FLY, just in general), but it's also possible that I (and others) see greater depth vs. just what's on the screen because of historical knowledge and experiences.
I would say that reading is the only one I can arrive at without the film undercutting itself or using the divorce as the only "separation" in the film; however, I'm not sure where that positions the maid as she seems even more of a strict traditionalist than anyone else in the film. Certainly she is much more say than the main man, though he is also not as contemporary as the mother. I then arrive at the problem of the mother being mostly underdeveloped as a character as well. Perhaps that makes sense since new identity is underdeveloped and uncertain, but I'm not sure that there is enough evidence in the film for it to serve as personally fulfilling.
I'm not saying this isn't the most complex deal grappled with in the film, and again it's the only one I think that isn't inherently undercut by the script when considering different manifestations of the titular separation, but because the film is so concerned with pulling strings and having attention focus on the central conflict between old brigade and slightly newer but still clinging to traditionalist brigade rather than putting old and new in conflict or conversation with one another until the finale, I feel the idea is incredibly underdeveloped just like the mother character.
The constant focus on people behind glass reinforces, once again, this idea of separation, but if it is the lack of ability of this middle group to break from the traditionalists I don't see many points where the film directly grapples with that idea. Instead, it leaves it open to being one of the ideas it is interested in without ever actually pursuing it with much more than a few scenes sprinkled in here and there before moving on to focus on the separation between man and wife, daughter and father, daughter and mother, father and father, child and child, class and class, again without a focused sense of unity or completeness.
I think that's the fundamental problem I have with this film, is that it presents us with all these ideas and, perhaps even, themes it can be about while ultimately being about little more than what's on the surface.