Rana, Tarahneh Alidoosti and Emad, Shahab Hosseini
Iran has commanded its share of the headlines and mention in the Presidential debates. It’s been vilified and become one of the go to punching bags for the recently installed President who’s included Iran in his list of seven Muslim countries whose citizens who will not be allowed into the United States for at least the next 30 days.
This is not to say that Iran doesn’t have it’s own ultra conservatives in power who bolster their appeal among the less well educated rural followers (sounds familiar) through demonizing the outside world – especially the United States that’s still called the “Great Satan” by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Weekly prayers trumpet the call for “Death to America” but visitors report there’s an interest to reconnect with the West.
This desire to reconnect is evident in the Iranian film “The Salesman,” that’s been nominated for an Academy Award in the Foreign Language category.
The film, written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, who’s best known for his film “A Separation,” takes us inside the life of a middle class couple trying to navigate the changing culture and physical landscape of modern Tehran.
Tehran reminds Farhadi of what New York must have been like when Arthur Miller wrote “Death of a Salesman.” He cites Miller’s description of the town at the opening of the play. “A town whose face is changing at a heady pace, destroying everything that’s old, orchards and gardens, to replace them with towers,” wrote Farhadi. “Tehran is changing in a frenetic, anarchic, irrational way.”
Like several of his other films, a house is a central component to this look at the changes the main characters, a married couple, Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti), and the people they encounter, are struggling to understand and survive.
The couple lead a middle class life surviving on his salary as a literature teacher and their shared passion for theater. Their fascination with the West and the parallels to what Miller wrote about are seen in a staging of “The Death of a Salesman” by the theater group that’s cast them in the role of Willy Loman and as his long suffering wife, Linda. What begins as a paean to American theater becomes a “who done it” as their real life, at least if filmic terms, intrudes upon their stage roles.
Home life is upended when they’re forced to evacuate their apartment that gives every sign of being moments away from disintegrating. They join their neighbors in a mad dash to the streets and begin the hunt for a new place to live.
As luck, or plot necessity dictates, the theater manager happens to have an apartment that’s conveniently being vacated by its current tenant. They move in to this roof top apartment and discover that the former occupant has taken over one room to house her stuff while she finds somewhere else to live. After numerous attempts to get her to collect her things they move them out to the open roof.
Unfortunately, the previous occupant doesn’t let her customers know she’s moved and when Rena is home alone one of them rings the door buzzer. Of course, Rana assumes it’s Emad coming home from rehearsal. When Emad does come home later he sees blood on the stairs. He ruhes upstairs to find Rana has been attacked.
At the hospital Rana must decide whether to have a rape kit done and whether to bring in the police. She’s reluctant to contact the authorities and go through that process. The personal and cultural pressure she’s under aren’t quite clear to this Westerner but they’re all to real to her.
Emad is conflicted and wants to help but isn’t quite sure what to do. Their life, like their former apartment, is on the verge of collapse. A circuitous set of chance encounters eventually leads Emad to someone he considers as the prime suspect.
But like his wife, he doesn’t quite know what to do with that knowledge or how to react to the theater manager who’s provided them the apartment without warning that the it’s been the home of a prostitute who uses it to entertain her clients.
The characters are on shaky ground whether it’s in the roles they perform on stage, in their apartments, in their marriage and in their culture who’s mores are in flux.
Farhadi’s style delivers these scenes from an ever compounding set of dilemmas in an unadorned, realistic way that gives the viewer the sense that you’re in the room while life unfolds. Nothing is hurried or feels artificially enhanced to create drama where it doesn’t exist. The tension and conflict arise organically from the situations the multifaceted characters encounters.
Nothing is simple. Every decision and judgment brings with it a complex set of circumstances, customs, sometimes anger and always a range of emotions that defy easy answers but are laden with consequences.
“The Salesman” is another masterwork for Farhadi who opens the windows on worlds we know little about but that speak to audiences everywhere.
The Salesman Opens January 27 in Los Angeles and New York
Rated: PG 13 – Run time: 125 minutes
Language: Persian with English subtitles