The Salesman ( 2016) is an Iranian domestic drama, conspicuously impoverished and understated until its explosive final reel. Directed by the highly lauded Asgar Farhadi, the film was awarded an Oscar for Best Foreign Picture. The film is difficult for several for reasons. First, there is the problem of construing a non-European foreign film set in a country that looks modern but that is culturally very different from Europe and the United States. Simply, and insensitively stated, we can't parse what is pathology common to Iranian society from pathology unique to an individual character. This is particularly true in a film that is primarily about the role of women and their rights in modern Tehran. The society's strict gender roles, the separation of the sexes in school, and the country's practice, here shown to be remarkably illogical, of requiring women to wear head scarves as a sign of their subordinate status occludes an understanding that only gradually dawns on the viewer -- the principal male character, Emad, is crazy and a nasty man to boot. What we initially interpret as a malaise afflicting the society as a whole is exemplified in the protagonist who has, in effect, lost his mind. Second, Farhadi's hands are tied by the Iranian censors; this is particularly problematic for a film that turns on an attempted rape. Asfagar makes a witty internal reference to the strictures enforced on his film early in the movie. A staggeringly incompetent group of Iranian actors, something like a community theater troupe, are rehearsing Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. (The protagonist has a picture of Marilyn Monroe turned sideways on his dresser.) A woman observes that the censors are requiring three cuts in the script. So Farhadi stages three provocations in his film. On two occasions, someone goes into a toilet to urinate. Another person stands at the door listening to them. Obviously, Farhadi is not allowed to simulate any sounds relating to excretion. Nonetheless, we hear a trickle of water on both occasions, only to learn from the next shot, that someone is has turned on a faucet. It's a risible device and clearly intended as an affront to the censor. Similarly, a dignified Iranian actress is required to play an American woman of low repute -- she mentions in the play's dialogue that she is half-naked and "has to dress." One of the actors bursts into laughter during the rehearsal -- the woman is dressed from head-to-toe in an elaborate scarlet dress and, in fact, wearing a big hat with a feather on it. Iranian censors require women of low repute to wear scarlet dresses, be completely covered, and substitute for their drab headscarf, a flamboyant hat. This is what the other actor finds so funny much to the outrage of the aggrieved actress who threatens to quit the show. The third problem that the film poses is that it is very, very slow, Farhadi is a persnickety director and, unlike many American filmmakers, he dots every "i" and crosses every "t". The film's plot is carefully established and, then, because Farhadi is an artist, an elaborate system of echoes, resonances, and cross-references is installed. The film is densely symbolic, but, in the manner of Ibsen -- it is also intensely realistic. The middle hour of the film is unrelieved tedium, the slowest of slow burns leading to a spectacularly emotional and gripping confrontation at the end. As an example of Farhadi's plodding, but ultimately effective, labor -- he builds this movie before your eyes brick by brick -- there is a theme involving public humiliation. If you err in Iran, people call your family, tell your wife, and shame you in front of your children. The anti-hero, Emad, is a schoolteacher and, when he falls asleep while showing a movie (an universal technique that teachers use around the world to avoid teaching), the students take cell-phone pictures of him snoring. Emad is outraged when he wakes up, seizes a student's cell-phone, and, then, studies the pictures on the device -- apparently, the kid has downloaded some porn onto his phone. Emad says: "I'm going to call your father and let him look at the pictures on your phone." Then, someone tells him that the boy's father is dead. At the end of the movie, when Emad confronts the man who attacked his wife, he is not interested in calling the police -- instead, he says that he will call the man's wife, daughter, and future son-in-law (who have been shopping for their wedding) to humiliate him in front of his family. This is merely one of many examples that might be adduced as to Farhadi's hard work setting up all of the allusions, parallels, and symbols that the film needs for its meanings. This would not be so painful but for the fact that Farhadi is resolutely humorless -- there's nothing funny in the film. And, furthermore, he adopts a Dubliner's style of "scrupulous meanness" with respect to his mise-en-scene: this is one of the ugliest movies ever made. The characters look shabby and live in hideous ramshackle concrete tenements. Farhadi shoots the film like an episode of The Office -- he uses a tag-along handheld camera with a slight, but perceptible wobble to follow his characters. Make no mistake: Farhadi knows exactly what he wants to show and how he wants to stage the action -- he is master of indirection and de-dramatization in the manner of Abbas Kiastoami. But the film's sheer ugliness and lack of any kind of cinematic elegance, all of which is intended, make the middle hour of The Salesman a kind of purgatory.
So what is The Salesman about? Broadly speaking, the film explores sexism in Tehran. The mechanism for this analysis is a rape, or attempted rape, inflicted upon the hero's wife, Rana. Emad and Rana live in a horrible concrete office block that threatens to collapse one night. It is not clear whether the building is collapsing from its own weight or being undermined -- one shot shows a front-end loader digging at the foundation of the building. What is clear is that building will function as a symbol for the failing marriage between Rana and Emad -- the windows in the apartment shatter and we see their bedroom with two huge fissures over the marital bed. Emad is a high school teacher and he is acting the role of the old salesman in Miller's play. Rana performs the part of his wife in that theater work. Babak, another actor in the play, is a local landlord and he has an apartment that is vacant -- the previous tenant is reputed to have been a prostitute. Rana and Emad move into the apartment. The previous tenant's property is locked in a room and there are sinister overtones about the manner in which she left the place. Babak is evasive about her and refuses to call to demand that she remove her furniture, including a child's bike, from the premises. (Instead, the furniture is put outdoors under a kind of awning where it is ruined by the rain.) Just before Rana takes a shower, she buzzes open the security door, expecting it to be her husband -- instead, it is a man who either rapes, or attempts to rape, her. (The man also leaves money for her on the mantle.) Everyone assumes that Rana is somehow complicit in the rape -- after all, she buzzed the man into the apartment -- and given this pervasive attitude of blaming the victim, it is not surprising that Rana doesn't ask for police help. (This part of the film is very hard to construe: Emad never really asks Rana what happened and she doesn't tell him -- this peculiarity is, perhaps, an artifact of censorship, but, also, turns out to be evidence of Emad's madness. Emad doesn't really care exactly what happened to his wife -- he is more concerned with avenging to damage to his masculine pride.) It takes a while for the light to dawn on us: Emad thinks he is the victim, feels that he is the person who has been wronged, and sets out to solve the crime himself and inflict retribution on the wrongdoer. We discover that Emad is, in effect, crazed when he prohibits eating pasta that was inadvertently bought with the money left by the assailant -- it is as if the food, itself, is tainted by the assault. Ultimately, Emad lures the perpetrator to the collapsing building where there is a confrontation involving all the principals in the film. This sequence is stunning and represents the pay-off for all of the elaborate scene-setting comprising the first ninety minutes of the film. At the climax, fundamental questions are posed about revenge, mercy, and justice -- the question is raised as who was really wronged in the assault. Emad thinks that he has been the person primarily injured, a conviction that the casually sexist society around him also maintains. Babak, it turns out, has been sexually harassing the prostitute and, probably, she paid her rent with her body. Everyone assumes that prostitutes can be raped without recompense and that, in fact, this doesn't even constitute a crime. Since rape is a crime for which the woman always primarily at fault, it doesn't really pay to investigate such things or even talk much about them. Finally, the film draws complex, elliptical, but satisfying connections to Miller's play. The sexual transgression in the play that was hidden and destroys Biff Loman, Willie's favorite son, is played-out in the relationship between the would-be rapist and his own family. And, it seems, that, perhaps, the characters have inadvertently learned something from Miller's play -- the calamity that befalls the characters in The Death of a Salesman seems, perhaps, avoided in Farhadi's film. This is a demanding film and, rather unattractive for most of its screen-time, but it deserves to be seen.
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