The Salesman is another excellent film from Iranian Director Asghar Farhadi. The film won the 2016 Best Foreign Film Oscar, and Farhadi made additional waves when he refused to attend the ceremony in response to Trump’s travel ban.
The movie focuses on a married couple in the center of a Tehran-based theatre company that is staging Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Various scenes from the play are part and parcel of the film, shot in present day Tehran.
The married couple at the center (playing much older Willy and Linda Loman in the play) along with other tenants, have to evacuate their house after serious structural weaknesses occur, likely from construction going on nearby. A member of the acting troupe offers them an apartment they take on a temporary basis. Shortly after moving in, the wife, thinking her husband is returning, buzzes him in while she is showering. We then see her at the hospital being treated for quite serious wounds and injuries. It appears the apartment’s previous tenant had been a woman “with numerous make visitors” and the assumption is that one of them came to do her harm, and not knowing she’d moved, attacked the wrong woman.
The wife, Rana, is devastated and humiliated by the attack, suffers greatly psychologically as well as physically, and feels guilty for having let the man in. She doesn’t want to go to the police to report the incident because of the humiliation involved. The husband, Emad, acquiesces, but decides to pursue the attacker on his own. The attacker has left possessions including his car keys, phone and money in the apartment when he was apparently spooked by Rana’s screams, and using these, Emad tracks down the attacker. Stresses and consequences occur along the way for Rana and Emad as individuals, as a couple, as neighborhood residents, and as acting troupe members.
Many of the themes of Miller’s play, particularly those related to humiliation, respect, and situations that change who we are, are interwoven with the film plot, and their lives and roles continually impact each other.
Extremely well acted and directed, and not to be missed. We’ve now seen maybe 3 of Farhadi’s films, and they are all excellent.