The Sales­man – first look review

No-one, how­ev­er lib­er­al or enlight­ened, is immune to regres­sive polit­i­cal poli­cies or cul­tur­al tra­di­tions. Even if you don’t agree with them, soci­ety has ways of shack­ling them to your ankle, insist­ing that they are addressed and adhered to in some form or anoth­er. Liv­ing by the dic­tates of a coun­try means that per­son­al pol­i­tics are taint­ed by col­lec­tive desire. This uncom­fort­able spec­u­la­tion lingers omi­nous­ly in the back­stage dress­ing rooms of Asghar Farhadi’s dis­turb­ing new fea­ture, The Sales­man, which pre­miers in com­pe­ti­tion at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.

The film opens with the some­what indel­i­cate metaphor of a cou­ple being forced to aban­don their apart­ment when bull­doz­ers acci­den­tal­ly chip away at its foun­da­tions and it is deemed unsafe for habi­ta­tion. Yes, their world is lit­er­al­ly falling beneath their feet. Dur­ing the day, he, Emad (Sha­hab Hos­sei­ni), is a school teacher (of boys only), while at night both he and his wife, Rana (Taraneh Ali­doosti), moon­light as the­atre actors, cur­rent­ly work­ing on a cen­sored pro­duc­tion of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

In their moment of dire need, one of their fel­low play­ers offers them a new apart­ment, neglect­ing to men­tion that it was once called home by a call­girl whose clients still come knock­ing. When Rana is alone and tak­ing a show­er to remove her the­atre warpaint, a com­mu­ni­ca­tion mishap leads her to acci­den­tal­ly buzz up a per­son who is not her hus­band. Farha­di, as he did in his 2011 film, A Sep­a­ra­tion, uses a ellip­sis to hide from the audi­ence exact­ly what has hap­pened, sup­press­ing a posi­tion of nar­ra­tive advan­tage and plac­ing us on the same low­ly lev­el as the moral­ly bewil­dered couple.

The first hour of the film is slow going. It’s pon­der­ous and furtive, and nev­er in a par­tic­u­lar­ly com­pelling way. Farhar­di parcels out infor­ma­tion and makes you wait to dis­cov­er its rel­e­vance. Yet, more than in pre­vi­ous films, there are ele­ments to this one that want for cred­i­bil­i­ty. Or that Farhar­di doesn’t work hard enough to con­struct a rig­or­ous and believ­able dra­mat­ic con­text, which in turn under­cuts the hys­ter­i­cal melo­dra­ma which sur­faces in the film’s final act. When you’re deal­ing with such intri­cate emo­tions and attempt­ing to make grand state­ments from what, in the scheme of things, is a triv­ial domes­tic sit­u­a­tion, the small details need to be iron­clad. If you invite close scruti­ny, make sure the num­bers add up. Here, they almost do.

It’s tough to under­stand why Farhar­di opt­ed to name his film The Sales­man. The con­nec­tion between the play and the dra­ma play­ing out in real life seems tac­it at most. It’s prob­a­bly for the best that there is no lit­er­al mir­ror­ing of the char­ac­ters and their coun­ter­parts, and what­ev­er the writer-direc­tor has in mind appears fine­ly-wrought and oblique­ly sym­bol­ic. It is, how­ev­er, sub­tle to the point of irrel­e­vance. The only inter­est­ing facet about hav­ing the char­ac­ters return to the stage every evening is the irony of them being able to momen­tar­i­ly depart from the anguish of their lives and con­sume the body and mind of another.

Yet the actors are seen as being phys­i­cal­ly unable to sub­due their their atti­tudes and ingrained beliefs, and what we most­ly see of the play is the moments where the worlds of fic­tion and real­i­ty col­lide. Per­haps Emad him­self feels that he’s sim­ply play­ing the role of a tol­er­ant, humane gen­tle­man, and that he’s unable to keep the sav­age, regres­sive pro­tec­tor from burst­ing forth at any giv­en oppor­tu­ni­ty? Vio­lence becomes a right rather than a choice.

Emad’s trans­for­ma­tion from com­pas­sion­ate hus­band to white-eyed aveng­ing angel is made to feel entire­ly sud­den rather than the result of a long-ges­tat­ing accu­mu­la­tion of woes. The police are removed from the equa­tion ear­ly on because it is felt that Rana would auto­mat­i­cal­ly be seen as the offend­ing par­ty and dragged through the mud. It’s a shame that Farhar­di him­self is less inter­est­ed in explor­ing why women are undu­ly sex­u­alised and enfee­bled as a mat­ter of course, and retains much of his focus on ask­ing why men feel nat­u­ral­ly bound to assume the sta­tus of alpha guardians.