FEBRUARY 28, 2017
It’s only the end of February, and we’ve got our first great film of 2017.
If you watched that chaotic Academy Awards on Sunday night, there was one memorable moment of grace. Iranian astronaut Anousheh Ansari and ex-NASA scientist Firouz Naderi took to the stage to accept the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for “The Salesman,” written and directed by one of the world’s great filmmakers Asghar Farhadi. The director chose to stay in Iran and asked Ansari to deliver his moving acceptance speech, observing that “dividing the world into ‘us’ and ‘enemies’ categories creates fear between us and others” and calling for “an empathy that we need today.”
Farhadi is no stranger to the Academy Awards. His extraordinary film, “A Separation,” another tale of a marriage on the brink, brought him the 2011 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and his French-language followup, “The Past” (2013), was no slouch either. In fact, he is one of the most perceptive screenwriters working today, and “The Salesman” shows him at the very top of his work.
Farhadi, who often uses symbolism in a very subtle way, has picked a doozie to begin “The Salesman,” as married couple Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) are awakened when they realize that their apartment building is shaking and on the verge of collapse, little suspecting that their happy marriage will soon be in the same state through no fault of their own.
Currently co-starring in a local community theater production of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” Emad and Rana are offered an apartment in which to stay that was formerly occupied by a tenant who had…let’s just say, many gentleman callers. Many gentleman callers.
One night, when Rana leaves the apartment door open for Emad who is coming back from the theater, one of those gentleman callers suddenly appears, and the result is an assault on Rana. Farhadi made the wise artistic decision to keep details of the assault vague — it was certainly physical but was it sexual as well? We’ll never know. But what’s important is what comes after.
Rana withdraws, not reporting the incident to the authorities because that would force her to expose her life to authoritarian questioning. (Whoever says that “The Salesman” is not political doesn’t know much about women or about politics.) Emad shares Rana’s distrust of the police, but if you can’t rely on the authorities, how do you do the right thing? And for that matter, what IS the right thing to do here?
Certainly, the guilt that Emad feels about not being there to protect his wife when she was attacked dings his ego and his masculinity, but is the right thing to respond in kind and go all Charles Bronson on her attacker? And how, for that matter, can he find her attacker without involving the police?
It’s a complicated situation that Farhadi lays about beautifully — every step that Emad takes in locating the attacker only strains his relationship with his wife more. I would rank Farhadi as one of the top 2 or 3 storytellers working in film today, as he draws out enormous emotional and political depth from his seemingly simple stories of a marriage.
Here’s how good he is — a lesser writer would have written Emad and Rana’s troubles to mirror exactly the marriage of the Linda and Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman” and would congratulate himself on his own cleverness. Farhadi digs deeper, drawing on the underlying themes of why the Lomans are falling apart in “Salesman” and the dwindling communication that is happening to between Emad and Rana, finding unexpected resonances between each marriage. In Farhadi’s hands, these scenes from a marriage will absolutely break your heart.
I can’t wait to see “The Salesman” again.
GRADE: A-
