Taraneh Alidoosti and Shahab Hosseini (Amazon Studios and Cohen Media Group)
The best films of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi immerse us in harrowing domestic dramas, from the suspicious housewife of Fireworks, Wednesday to the wrenching marital discord of The Separation. His latest film, The Salesman, adds an ambitious level of artifice that briefly draws him away from his strengths. Yet the director inevitably gives us an uncomfortably intimate look at our most destructive emotions.
Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and his wife Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) are actors working on a stage production of Death of a Salesman. They are forced to vacate their Tehran apartment when nearby construction nearly causes the building to collapse. After the couple finds a new apartment, they learn that the previous resident led a sordid existence—one that comes to nearly tragic blows when a client looking for the prostitute who once lived in the apartment attacks Rana.
The film opens with shots of a bedroom that we soon learn is the part of the set for Death of a Salesman; shots like this are more formally lit than the naturalistic scenes of Emad and Rana off stage, but the theatrical setting frames the real life drama in a way that keeps the audience at a distance, at first.
A schoolteacher by day, Emad plays Willy Loman in the play-within-the-movie, and Arthur Miller’s play is a bit on the nose as a symbol of the failing American dream around the world. (A bit more subtle is the couple’s displacement by the supposed progress of a construction site). But as the husband seeks out his wife’s attacker, the movie draws on a different Western tradition, a consuming thirst for justice that stretches from Straw Dogs to Tarantino.
Which makes it a departure for what we may have come to expect from Farhadi and Iranian cinema. While a film like Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up offers the humane grace of forgiveness, Salesman offers the very human desire for revenge.
The Salesman operates on one level between the tensions of fiction and reality. Can we really escape our troubles through the catharsis of drama? Or do we hunger for blood, not art? But as with Farhadi’s best work, the director’s neorealist impulses more powerfully convey the heart of its conflicted characters.
Note: Although his film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, Farhadi would need an exception to President Donald Trump’s travel ban to attend the ceremony. He has chosen not to attend.
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The Salesman
Written and directed by Asghar Farhadi
Taraneh Alidoosti, Shahab Hosseini, Babak Karimi
125 minutes
Rated PG-13 for mature thematic elements and a brief bloody image
Open today at Landmark Bethesda Row, Angelika Mosaic and Regal Fairfax Towne Center
