The Salesman (2016)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Salesman (2016) – A. Farhadi

Rather harrowing in its portrayal of how sexual assault can affect a marriage (both the victim and her husband and their relationship).  But also rather strange in its fusing of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman to its plot -- as both a thematic parallel (in which a man responds to an apparent threat to his masculinity) and a surprisingly literal denouement (which I’ll leave unexplained so as not to spoil things).  You see the couple are actors who actually star in a community production of the play and a meeting with the local censors is the event that keeps the husband away late at the time his wife is attacked.  Then begins a search for the attacker and director Asghar Farhadi lets this unfold as any mystery might; they find his keys and his abandoned pick-up and try to piece things together without the aid of the police, who probably can’t be trusted. At the same time, we see how the trauma is impacting the couple, separately and together, and their psychological reactions and subsequent actions; Shahab Hosseini and Taraneh Alidoosti manage to convey some very nuanced and ambivalent feelings in their very strong performances.  Farhadi is a master at playing on the ambiguities in situations; it is hard to know who is right and who is wrong and what the best course of action should be – and this is before he throws in a plot twist or two. He won the Oscar for best foreign film for A Separation, 2011, and then again for this film.  His films show us Iranian society and its unique culture and constraints but it also shows us how people living there have the same feelings, needs, and moral choices as anywhere else.  All of Farhadi’s films are great but if I had to rank them, I would probably place About Elly (2009), A Separation (2011) and perhaps Fireworks Wednesday (2006) a bit higher than this one, which feels a little more forced and grimmer than usual.  But that is merely a quibble when all of his output is strides ahead of most challengers.