Mina wants to divorce her husband Morteza – apparently, ten years are enough. The two of them travel to the Caspian Sea to spend a weekend together there, which is apparently necessary in such cases. Mina’s suicidal sister Azar and Morteza’s friend Aziz make sure that not everything pans out as it was supposed to – starting with Mina’s pregnancy …
Mani Haghighi co-wrote the script for Canaan with Asghar Farhadi. It combines their interests: the Iranian middle class and their world-weariness, their “Weltschmerz”. For Haghighi’s standards, Canaan is a relatively classical and realistic melodrama, largely free of his usual dramaturgical hyperboles and his pleasure for escalation. For this film, it seems that for once he wanted to give the art of (loud) implosion a try. Accordingly, Canaan feels inspired by Antonioni in its slightly glacial and rather brittle elegance that is so completely different from the fleetingly porous poetry of Abadan and Men at Work.
