The Sales­man

The open­ing moments of Asghar Farhadi’s The Sales­man are a sal­vo against film crit­ics who accuse the direc­tor of cleav­ing too close­ly to con­ven­tion­al dra­mat­ic com­po­si­tion. Still shots of props, light­ing, and mul­ti-lev­el stage arrange­ment of an in-film pro­duc­tion of ​‘Death of a Sales­man’ is sud­den­ly dis­rupt­ed by a two-minute track­ing shot, breath­less­ly fol­low­ing mid­dle-class cou­ple Emad and Rana Ete­sa­mi (Sha­hab Hos­sei­ni and Taraneh Ali­doosti, both riv­et­ing) as they and their neigh­bours are forced to evac­u­ate their crum­bling apart­ment complex.

This jux­ta­po­si­tion of visu­al cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage stacked against the more sta­t­ic scenes from the Arthur Miller play turns out to be a run­ning thread through­out the film.

As is typ­i­cal of Farhadi’s the­mat­i­cal­ly-dense screen­plays, the cracked foun­da­tion of the couple’s home is a har­bin­ger of mar­i­tal ten­sion. While wait­ing for their old apart­ment to be repaired, Emad and Rana, part-time play­ers in the local the­atre group putting on the Miller pro­duc­tion, take up tem­po­rary res­i­dence in a flat owned by a fel­low actor in the com­pa­ny. How­ev­er, their new land­lord failed to dis­close the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the hasty exit of the flat’s pri­or ten­ant: a sex work­er oust­ed against her will, evi­denced by a locked room filled with her possessions.

Farha­di slow­ly builds The Sales­man around things left unsaid and unseen. The pre­vi­ous ten­ant, nev­er shown onscreen, goes from a mild curios­i­ty to lin­ger­ing pall. When a for­mer client of the ten­ant breaks in an attacks Rana, the event is
nev­er shown or spo­ken of in explic­it terms, oth­er than in the after­math – bewil­der­ing shots of a pro­fuse­ly bleed­ing cut on Rana’s head cou­pled with the mish-mash of con­tra­dic­to­ry tes­ti­mo­ny from neigh­bours who heard her cry out.

Rana throws her­self into the play want­i­ng to for­get about the inci­dent. Yet the far-reach­ing reper­cus­sions of rape (again, ever stat­ed as such in Farhadi’s script, but allud­ed to in the sub­text – pierc­ing gazes and unan­swered ques­tions between the cou­ple), are felt in the trace evi­dence. From Rana’s ban­daged head to a qui­et din­ner at home sud­den­ly becom­ing taint­ed by the use of mon­ey left by the pre­vi­ous ten­ant, The Sales­man is haunt­ed by these struc­tur­ing absences.

Like ​‘Death of a Sales­man’, Farhadi’s The Sales­man turns into a trag­ic exam­i­na­tion of mas­culin­i­ty, as Emad is unable to let go of the inci­dent in ques­tion, despite Rana’s protes­ta­tions. From this point, the film los­es momen­tum. The com­plex and often con­tra­dic­to­ry behav­iour that rape sur­vivors can exhib­it in the after­math of an attack is a com­pelling sub­ject, one that Farha­di only hints at. Emad’s search for revenge, a rework­ing of an old Iran­ian film trope, crescen­dos ear­ly and then awk­ward­ly peters out beyond that point.

The final shot, recall­ing the last lines of Miller’s play (“We’re free…”) los­es some emo­tion­al punch due to its poor­ly timed exe­cu­tion. Still, The Sales­man pro­vides fur­ther evi­dence of Farhadi’s mas­tery when it comes to artic­u­lat­ing the mid­dle-class woes of con­tem­po­rary Iran­ian society.