The Salesman won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film this past February, although the film’s victory was obscured by director Asghar Farhadi’s refusal to travel to the ceremony after the current Administration attempted to enact a de facto travel ban on people from his native Iran, among other countries. The ban and the director’s previous, eloquent statements criticizing it may have secured the win for the film, especially given the overall tone of the proceedings this year. Separating the movie from the atmosphere around it (as best as I can), however, the story and the two lead performances are more than deserving, and, as with his Oscar-winning A Separation, Farhadi has shown how much a strong screenwriter can do without resorting to the usual pandering of sex and violence. (The film is available on Amazon Prime, or for rent on iTunes.)
The movie’s title comes from the play within the film: A married couple, Rana and Emad, are also starring in a stage production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, with Emad as the protagonist Willy Loman and Rana as his wife, both wearing prosthetics and using makeup to appear much older than they are. The movie opens as the couple’s apartment building is evacuated as the structure begins to crack due to construction in the neighboring empty lot, putting the edifice at risk of collapse. One of their co-stars in the play has a vacant apartment in his building and offers it to the couple rent-free, but doesn’t fully explain why the previous resident left or why all of her stuff is still sitting in one locked room. Someone visits the apartment, apparently thinking the previous tenant is still there, and ends up assaulting Rana, putting her in the hospital with a skull injury and possible concussion. The aftermath of the assault drives a wedge between her and her husband, as she suffers obvious PTSD and doesn’t want to pursue a case against her unknown assailant while Emad struggles to understand why she can’t just ‘get over it’ yet simultaneously becomes fixated on finding the culprit and enacting vengeance.
Farhadi thrives on delicate pacing and dialogue that leaves much unsaid, which can be more powerful in the right hands but puts a great burden on the actors. Taraneh Alidoosti delivers one of the best performances of the year as Rana, going from the confident, matter-of-fact woman from before the attack to a woman showing all the signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, looking for emotional support her husband can’t give her, still trying to act in the play as it’s the one ‘normal’ thing she might be able to do. Shahab Hosseini is a bit maddening as Emad because he’s so perfectly aloof, unable to see past his own anger to help his wife, obsessing over finding the perpetrator – only to stumble on an answer he didn’t expect. And when that character is revealed in a tragicomic parallel to the play, Emad and Rana end up opposing each other over what to do about him: whether to grant him forgiveness or ruin his life by telling his family what he’s done.
The Salesman establishes its velocity early and never wavers from it; Farhadi doesn’t speed things up as we approach the resolution, and there’s no fake action to give the film a burst of energy. It’s a slow build, such that the tension near the end and the sense that something awful is going to happen is close to unbearable, after which Farhadi leaves the audience with an ambiguous closing scene (like that of A Separation) that leaves many aspects of the story open to interpretation. The story seems like it would demand an easy answer or a big finish, but even its most basic questions, like whether or how to forgive someone who committed a crime like the one depicted here, remain unresolved. His depiction of the attacker introduces an element of uncertainty that, at the very least, raises the possibility of empathy rather than justifying the initial reaction of one of the neighbors that he’d like to skin the culprit alive.
I’ve seen all five of the nominees for Best Foreign Language Film from last year – the others are Land of Mine, Tanna, Toni Erdmann, and A Man Called Ove – and would have voted for The Salesman too, giving it the edge over Tanna on story and the two lead performances. South Korea’s film board chose not to submit The Handmaiden, which I think would have at least given The Salesman a run for its money in the voting given the former’s high production values and strong LGBT storyline, although in the end the best film was the winner anyway.
I’d have voted for The Salesman as well. Land of Mine would have been my second choice.
It’s a testament to Farhadi that this is considered by many a weaker film than his previous three efforts that have gotten a stateside release (A Separation, About Elly, and The Past), and yet is so deeply absorbing and humanistic. The device of the unexplained missing tenant is to say that another just as interesting story could be told if Farhadi had chosen to drop us in a few months earlier, and in the lack of resolution we’re assured that whatever comes afterwards would be equally worthy to witness. This is a depth of truthfulness in storytelling that we aren’t accustomed to — I always exit a Farhadi movie (my local arthouse never misses one) in a state of heightened empathy for the strangers around me. That feeling wears off long before a new Farhadi arrives, so his fans are always hungry.