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Farhadi treats every film as a miniature, with a small number of precisely drawn characters. But in its exploration of the
social forces that operate in his much-misunderstood homeland, The Salesman is more ambitious in scope than any of his
films to date. Its subject, the inviolability of women and the ways that men exercise guardianship over it, is of course a
universal theme. But to my knowledge it has never been dealt with in such surgical detail by a filmmaker in Iran.
The Salesman breaks taboos and, unlike earlier Farhadi films, notably the Oscar-winning A Separation, has been permitted
a long run in Iranian cinemas by the state censors. (A Separation came out in 2011, before the glasnost of President Hassan
Rouhani, and was only briefly allowed onto the big screen.) These two facts have made The Salesman the biggest grossing
film in Iranian history. Admittedly, the sums involved are paltry in a country of relatively few movie theaters and a
superabundance of pirated Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice DVDs. But the film’s performance at the box office
shows that it speaks forcefully to its primary audience.
Farhadi’s new film revolves around a married couple, the stage actors Rana (the excellent Taraneh Alidoosti) and her
husband Emad—played by Shahab Hosseini, who shone in his supporting role as the pugnacious working-class husband
Hojjat in A Separation. As the film opens, Rana and Emad are in rehearsal to star as Linda and Willy in a Persian
production of Death of a Salesman. After the opening performance, while Emad remains at the theater dealing with the
censor—troubled, no doubt, by the play’s suggestions of sexual and alcoholic dissolution—Rana returns to the couple’s
new flat. There, she emerges from the shower in response to a ring at the doorbell. Thinking it is Emad, she buzzes in the
new arrival, leaves the door ajar, and returns to her ablutions. The next thing she knows she is being molested by a strange
man.
Here is The Salesman’s driving calamity. Rana’s instincts are to try and forget what has befallen her. Emad, on the other
hand, wants revenge, and not solely for the distress caused to his wife—as the plot progresses it becomes clear that Emad is
driven to track down Rana’s assailant above all by his sense that his guardianship of his wife has been challenged. This is
made explicit in the film’s climactic scene, when Emad snares the perpetrator and Rana begs her husband to let him go—or
their marriage is over. “Don’t interfere!” Emad snaps back.
To reach this moment, Farhadi has patiently layered his themes of patriarchy, reputation, and privacy. It emerges that the
previous inhabitant of the couple’s flat was a prostitute, and Rana’s molester a former client. (“Salesman” is a not entirely
satisfactory translation of the film’s Persian title; foroushande, which means “seller,” is either male or female, and can
have sexual connotations.) Emad himself is stung when the woman next to him in a shared taxi makes clear her
unhappiness at being seated in such close proximity to an unrelated male. And at the school where he teaches part time he
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Iran: A Private Agony | by Christopher de Bellaigue | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books 26/01/2017, 01)05
confiscates a naughty boy’s smartphone and scrolls through his personal photographs; the burden of victimhood shifts.
For all the nuance in this performance, however, the film’s central partnership subsides into immobility. Apart from a few
occasions (such as in the shared taxi, or the classroom), when he gives hints of a rounder character, Emad seems shaped
only by suppressed male anger, and this becomes a trope rather than a trait, tiresomely reminiscent of the character he
played in A Separation.
This does not seem to be the fault of the actor. When Farhadi allows him, Hosseini displays a more human panoply of
emotions, and even–a full hour into the film–lets slip a smile. But he is never the equal of Rana in complexity. The beauty
of A Separation was that no one was right. Here it is too clear with whom Farhadi’s sympathies lie.
A second conundrum is raised by the play within the film. Framing his story around a canonical text with which Western
audiences are perhaps overfamiliar, and Iranian ones hardly at all, is risky. Scenes from the theater company’s performance
of Death of a Salesman are folded into the film, and the actors’ ad-libbing and distortion of Miller’s lines effectively
convey their private agony. But I was unclear as to what correspondence, if any, exists between The Salesman and Miller’s
tale of despair and dashed expectations.
Farhadi seems to work best when directing three actors through their endless possibilities of word and heart: his last film,
The Past, is a brilliantly sustained pas de trois, while in A Separation the orderly disintegration of a marriage is
complicated and enriched by the couple’s daughter. So it is little surprise that the long, riveting final scene of The
Salesman, dominated by the interplay of victim, perpetrator, and avenger, is the most complete of the film. Here, at least,
Farhadi’s jungle is full of diamonds.
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Iran: A Private Agony | by Christopher de Bellaigue | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books 26/01/2017, 01)05
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