Movie review: A ‘Salesman’ that demands attention
When you blend the 20th century’s finest playwright, Arthur Miller, with perhaps this century’s finest filmmaker, Asghar Farhadi, you can expect something close to soul-shattering. And that’s “The Salesman.” It’s set in modern-day Tehran, but Farhadi’s Oscar-nominated tale of self-loathing and vengeance is timeless in its debunking of the male myth. In exploring the prevalence of machismo in an Islamic nation where women rank only slightly above chattel, Farhadi deftly plays off Miller’s masterful “Death of a Salesman” in depicting a husband consumed by a caveman mentality.
His name is Emad (Shahab Hosseini), an amateur actor who discovers his life has been an act after his beautiful wife and co-star, Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti), is sexually assaulted. Rather than attending to her immediate need for love and understanding, Emad instead becomes obsessed with righting a wrong — not for Rana — but himself. In his mind, revenge is necessitated because you attacked my property, in my home, and by God, you’re not going to get away with it.
It’s a theme of placing selfishness over compassion that permeates Farhadi’s body of work. But seldom has it been as riveting as it is here, as we sit in awe of Hosseini’s revelatory depiction of a man who not only plays Willy Loman in a local production of “Death of a Salesman,” he IS Willy Loman. Only he doesn’t know it; at least not at first. Hosseini picked up the Best Actor award at May’s Cannes Film Festival and it doesn’t take long to understand why watching Emad slowly, steadily self-destruct under the weight of his macho-driven need to appease a conscience wracked by guilt and anger.
It doesn’t really matter if Emad ever finds the perpetrator; the damage is instantly done in the eyes of his wife and friends — and himself. He’s not the man he, or they, thought he was. Like Loman, he is guilty of creating a false image of himself. For him, being Rana’s husband is subconsciously just another role hiding the villain lurking inside his rapidly shrinking heart. Any connection between the facade Emad has erected and the one built around Iran’s widely hypocritical theocracy is openly invited.
Like Shakespeare, Farhadi is of the belief that the entire world’s a stage, an opinion he repeatedly has fun with by blurring the lines (both spoken and figurative) inside the play playing inside the movie. It’s very meta, and also makes you wonder how often in real-life offstage transgressions are played out onstage between feuding actors, as is the case when Emad is ad-libbing barbed lines at his co-stars Babak (Babak Karimi), the man who lent him the unsecure flat where the assault occurred, and Rana, for whom playing Linda Loman isn’t just a role, it’s a harsh reality.
While Emad might not kill himself like Willy Loman, he’s definitely killing the man Rana thought she knew. And the carnage doesn’t end there. Farhadi also asks that we consider Ahoo, a character we never see (think Maris Crane from “Frasier”), but whose presence can be felt in just about every scene. She is the previous tenant of Emad and Rana’s rundown digs, where they’ve temporarily moved after (metaphor alert) their actual home started to crack and crumble. Although no one ever refers to Ahoo as a prostitute, that’s clearly the perception by Emad, who believes the intruder was one of her johns who mistook Rana for Ahoo. But is the assumption warranted? Just because Ahoo entertained a lot of men, does that make her immoral? Again, Farhadi is challenging Iran’s Neanderthal attitudes toward women. It’s also a facet of the film he’s taken criticism for from feminists who think Ahoo is being vilified. But clearly, they miss the point.
Farhadi’s respect for women is beyond reproach. All you need do is look at his oeuvre — from “About Elly” to “Fireworks Wednesday” to his Oscar-winning “A Separation” — to see his consistency in depicting Iranian women as nothing but smart, rational and unfairly repressed victims of a backward society. It’s the men who he’s unyielding with. They are the repressors. But their aggressions are not born out of spite; they’re born out of ignorance and a complete lack of self-awareness, as is the case with Emad — and to an even larger extent to Rana’s assailant. We eventually meet him, after Emad’s painstaking, stalker-like efforts bare fruits. And when we do, it’s a bit of a shock to see what a pathetic little man he is. It would have been easy for Farhadi to condemn him, but he actually makes you empathetic toward the little rat.
After all, like Emad, he’s just another casualty of a country and a government that places little value on women. In Iran, females are viewed as little more than vessels to please men by granting intercourse, bearing children and being good homemakers. Equals they surely are not. And therein lays the real tragedy of “The Salesman.” Like Arthur Miller’s Linda Loman, Rana is merely the collateral damage of a husband’s engorged ego run amok. For Emad, there will undoubtedly be forgiveness, but for Rana, and every other woman in Iran, there will be nothing.
“The Salesman”
Cast includes Shahab Hosseini, Taraneh Alidoosti, Babak Karimi and Farid Sajjadi Hosseini. (In Farsi with English subtitles)
(PG-13 for thematic elements and a brief bloody image)
Grade: A-