The Function of Thresholds in Asghar Farhadi's Three Films based on the Theories of Bakhtin and Kristeva

The cinema of Asghar Farhadi has garnered significant attention from researchers and critics over the past 20 years. Farhadi's reputation has increased due to winning prestigious international awards in the last two decades. His works have been analyzed through various disciplines in humanities such as psychology, ethics, philosophy, sociology, and women's studies. Additionally, his films are notable for their examination through different film criticism methods, including screenplay theories, narratology, and mise en scène analysis. This article focuses on the role of thresholds in Farhadi's films, in A Separation, The Past, and The Salesman. Key story events, tense moments, critical decisions, and characters' confrontations with ethical crises often occur in spaces like hallways, staircases, entryways, and doorways. Bakhtin introduced the concept of thresholds in his critique of Dostoevsky's works, explaining it within different types of narrative chronotopes. Bakhtin believed that Dostoevsky frequently depicted individuals at the threshold of irreversible decisions, at critical moments of crisis, and at pivotal life changes, placing characters in a threshold through appropriate chronotopes. Julia Kristeva's social-psychoanalytic criticism has expanded Bakhtin's threshold. She invokes the term "threshold" (Fr. le seuil) to indicate "the common point" at which her major concepts converge. Kristeva's work confronts the unsettling processes of meaning and the subject as a more general socio-historical crisis, which may be witnessed in art. Based on the theories of Bakhtin and Kristeva and the analysis of the three mentioned films, various aspects of thresholds in their theories can be identified, including narrative thresholds, bodily thresholds, the kitchen as a substitute for the drawing room (the hall, the dining room), thresholds in mise-en-scène, the dynamic of subject absence/presence, the threshold of the semiotic/symbolic, and the open-ended dialogue. The social-psychoanalytic analysis of these films revealed that thresholds are an effective narrative device for character development and engaging the audience. While generally being classified as social dramas, Farhadi's films portray deep personal crises. This apparent contradiction can be understood through Bakhtin's concept of thresholds and its expansion in Kristeva's social/psychoanalytic approach. Bakhtin viewed human social nature as inherently interactive, and Kristeva considered the threshold between individual/society and the space between the personal/public as the site for the formation of speaking subjects. Therefore, significant personal events with the emergence or disappearance of the subject inevitably occur at the threshold of confrontations. From this perspective, personal crises are inherently social, and examining social issues in contemporary society is possible through analyzing personal issues and problems. Following the collapse of symbolic systems, Kristeva sees art and psychoanalysis as the only means of social analysis in the modern era, as these two fields document the overflow of the semiotics. The main characters in the three films analyzed belong to the middle class, a social group in Iran characterized by the decline of religious/traditional values. Thus, their personal/moral crises, according to Kristeva, are contextualized within a larger historical/social crisis. As emphasized in Kristeva's "Fantasy and Cinema," and highlighted in the analysis of these films, personal stories of suffering in cinema have the power to authentically represent social realities.