A Hero2021

The films by Asghar Farhadi always have a certain ambiguity, wherein viewers are invoked to have conflicting feelings towards the morality of his characters—something I also experienced from *A Separation *and The Salesman, which makes them more human, I guess. The characters from A Hero are not at all different: one moment you root for them, the second you find them despicable, and then you understand them a little bit more—why they act the way that they do. What a master class in studying the human condition, its frailties and weaknesses. Farhadi never categorizes his protagonists as normatively good or his antagonists as inherently evil. He knows that all of us are capable of being both depending on the situation. Like Rahim, all of us wanted to be seen and heard, to be special, to feel for once that our existence is validated, despite the means.