Passing over Sisters: Denial of Farhadi’s Unsafe Society

Abstract

Employing semiology to study the academy award-winning director, Asghar Farhadi’s oeuvre up to 2016, this paper wishes to scrutinize his depicted society through the lens of feminism. His female characters’ lifestyle and their way of thinking show they always feel uneasy in Farhadi’s depicted society. It defines woman the same as what other patriarchal societies do, an object in need of protection. In this undesirable condition, women are expected to back their sisters up; however, the opposite is true about nearly all female characters in Farhadi’s cinema. They usually live while denying each other as a sort of defense mechanism, and after Farhadi’s famous accidents, there is always one or more female characters putting the blame on the female victim of the accident, technically speaking, referred to as victim-blaming. This paper wants to seek a psychological answer for this unusual behavior. In this regard, seven movies have been chosen including: Dancing in the Dust (2003), Beautiful City (2004), Fireworks Wednesday (2006), About Elly (2009), A Separation (2011), The Past (2013), and The Salesman (2016).