Ever since writer/director Asghar Farhadi became the first Iranian filmmaker to win a Oscar and a Golden Globe in 2011 for his stunning movie A Separation, he has continued to helm compelling dramas of domestic discord that show the uneasiness of women’s roles in contemporary Iranian society.
The Salesman starts very dramatically with the impending collapse of a Tehran Apartment building where Emad (Shahab Hosseini) lives with his wife Rana (Taranaeh Alidoosti). Now homeless they accept an offer to move into a large shabby rooftop apartment nearby which still has one of its rooms crammed full of the last tenant’s possessions. She has evidently refused to come and collect it, and when they press the Landlord on the matter he is extremely vague and evasive.
Emad and Rana are both members of an amateur drama group who are performing Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman, which turns out in their case that it is life repeating art with Emad playing Willy Loman and Rana playing his beleaguered wife Linda
One night when Rana is alone in the new apartment she responds to the intercom’s ring by buzzing in who she thinks is Emad as he is always mislaying his keys. When in fact Emad does arrive home sometime later he finds Rana lying unconscious in the shower in a pool of blood as a result of being violently struck on the head. After being treated in the hospital’s ER room she receives stitches but other than that the prognosis is fine, and she is released to go home. However the unprecedented attack has completed unnerved her and from that time on the normally confident Rana is terrified of being left alone. When Emad insists on still going to the high school where he teaches and thus leaving Rana at home, she is a bag of nerves and becomes very tearful and extremely agitated.
Emad is however determined to play at being a private eye to try and identify the assailant and track him down to exhort some sort of revenge. He is helped with clues that he finds like a cell phone, and a set of keys to the man’s truck that is parked on the street outside his building. By talking to the neighbors he also discovers that the mysterious former tenant was a prostitute, euphemistically called ‘a woman with many male companions’, and he soon works out that the intruder had actually come looking for her, obviously not knowing that she had moved.
When he accidentally discovers the identity of Rana’s attacker he lures him back to their apartment to confront him although he is still unsure on what sort of punishment to inflict. However Emad is shocked to realize that his wife who had been growing increasingly distant since the attack is now totally against him doing anything. In fact her emotional withdrawal turns out to be a far bigger problem for Emad to deal with, and is in fact the main reason for his anger which he is taking out on the elderly and sick attacker who is now begging and pleading to be released.
At the start of the movie it is easy to interpret the lack of any real intimacy and or signs of affection between Emad and Rana as a cultural thing. Then as the tense drama unfolds after the attack we initially perceive that we are witnessing the actions of a good husband wanting to be his wife’s protector and white knight. Whereas in reality her disdain for Emad turns into him actually wanting to harm her attacker as way of exacting revenge for her rejection of him.
The Salesman is an exacting thriller in which Farhardi carefully keeps our intrigue fully engaged by never giving a hint of how the drama will play out. He is masterly storyteller and has a style that is uniquely his own that gives us a superb narrative such as this that has one so very fully engaged until the final credits role. He is greatly helped by his strong cast of Hosseini (also in A Separation), and Alidoosti plus Babak Karami who plays the intruder, and they all give subtle nuanced and totally wonderful performances.
Farhadi’s movie is another of his powerful character-driven dramas that confirms his well-deserved reputation at Iran’s best contemporary filmmaker, and it stands an excellent chance of scooping up his second Best Foreign Picture Oscar that the film has already been nominated for.
