As I try to point out in the book, the concept of ‘National cinema’ is slippery and I’m not sure it is helpful as such. On the other hand, the situation in Iran is now almost unique. Those Iranian directors whose Iranian-produced films get seen in the international marketplace and at home have had to find ways of working through metaphor/allegory and various other aesthetic devices. Farhadi does seem to produce very similar scripts for each film and the difference in the French production is that the characters don’t have the same fears about what the rest of society will think of their actions as they might do in a similar set of circumstances in Iran. This throws more emphasis on questions of personal morality. In that sense I don’t think it would be different for Farhadi if he was making the film in the UK, Spain or the US. Having said that, there are specific social issues in France that I discussed in the blog post.

I agree that this film possibly lacks some of the emotional power of the earlier films but I’m not sure about your reasoning as to why this might be the case. It might simply be that he is working in a language that he doesn’t understand (he had to work through an interpreter) – and loses something in the process. Regarding your second point, I think that I tried to express that in my comments about not working through metaphor and allegory. Certainly the characters don’t have to ‘appear’ to be behaving in particular ways in the French context and moral questions become more ‘personal’ than societal?