The Salesman

The first action of The Salesman is an apartment building starting to collapse. It's an apt metaphor for Asghard Farhadi's film, another in which he examines how a marriage falls apart. The building does not completely come down, but is uninhabitable, and there is a large crack in the bedroom of Edam and Rana, a young married couple.

Played by Shahab Hosseini and Taraneh Alidoosti, respectively, the couple are part of a Tehranian middle class. He teaches literature in high school, and both are taking part in a community theater production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (Hosseini is Willy Loman, hence the title).

One of their co-stars, made aware of their search for a new apartment, is a landlord who has a place. They like it, though the previous tenant has left a lot of of her stuff. Slowly it unfolds that she was a prostitute (that word is never used--she was "promiscuous," "had a lot of male visitors," etc.

One night, Alidoosti comes home earlier from a production, while Hosseini meets with censors (one of the several Iranian touches). The door buzzes and, thinking it's her husband, she buzzes him in and opens the door. But as we watch the door slowly swing open from inertia, we realize that it's not Hosseini coming up. As Anthony Lane pointed out in his review, it's a scene Michael Haneke would love.

Alidoosti is attacked, but she does not see her attacker. When Hosseini realizes who was the previous tenant, he thinks it is one of her clients, who mistakes Alidoosti (who was in the shower) for the whore. He goes about trying to track this person down. In another Iranian touch, and what makes it entirely different from a Western film, the couple do not consult the police. In the U.S. a woman brought into an ER with a head wound would automatically attract police presence, but in Tehran it is thought better to just keep it quiet.

Eventualy Husseini finds his man, and it's in a most ingenious fashion that Farhadi introduces him. This leads to a socko finish, an entire last act in one space--the fractured apartment, where Hosseini decides to enact revenge. Alidosti wants to forgive him, and tells Hosseini if he doesn't let him go their marriage is over. Suddenly the stakes are much higher than Hosseini can handle.

The Salesman makes for gripping drama, and Farhadi is a very clever man. Not only does he use the metaphor of the crumbling building at the beginning, but he begins and ends the film with someone being carried down stairs. Hosseini does at the beginning, rescuing a disabled man, while at the end another man is carried down the stairs, dying, while Hosseeini does nothing.

The one thing I have not been able to figure out is, why Death of a Salesman? Clearly Farhadi chose this play specifically, one of the greats of the American theater, as his background story. But the parallels between the stories and the characters don't seem to be there. Death of a Salesman is essentially about how a man wastes his life in pursuit of an ever-out-of-reach dream, and ends up failing his family. What is has to do with The Salesman I will have to ponder more.