All the roles, large and small, are
perfectly played by an excellent cast. (Review: Patrick Compton - 9/10)
This is a deeply absorbing, suspenseful
account of the serpent of patriarchy that lurks within even the so-called
enlightened marriage of a cultured, middle-class Iranian couple in Tehran.
Writer-director Asghar Farhadi already has
one Best Foreign Film Oscar to his name in the shape of A Separation, now this year’s triumph of A Salesman gives him a pigeon pair.
Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh
Alidoosti) are part of Tehran’s modernist elite. He is a popular English
teacher at a local university while both engage part-time in amateur theatre.
The opening scene of the movie shows the stage set of Arthur Miller’s famous
play, Death of a Salesman, in which
the couple take the lead roles of Willie and Linda Loman. Throughout the film,
Farhadi switches from the action onstage to the increasingly sinister sequence
of events off it, suggesting certain parallels.
In the early scenes, we are shown just how
enlightened and popular Emad is with his intellectually curious students, while
he and Rana seem a model bourgeois couple, a seemingly vast intellectual
distance away from the nation’s fundamentalist rulers whose presence is felt
off-camera by the occasional reference to the censors threatening to amend the
play’s script.
But the worm of corruption is hinted at
early on when the couple are forced to leave their apartment because of the
building’s physical instability – the fissures in the wall perhaps symbolising
impending cracks in their relationship.
They are then directed by a friend to take
occupation of another apartment, but are disturbed to find that its last tenant
was, effectively, a “wild woman” (effectively, a prostitute). This fact comes
back to bite them when Rana is “disturbed” in the shower by a stranger who
clearly believed he was visiting the other woman. This mysterious event – we
are never quite sure what happens to Rana beyond suffering a head injury –
gathers a kind of dark momentum that leads to a tense, brilliantly observed
final sequence that serves as a coruscating judgment not only on the marriage
but also on the society in which it operates.
All the roles, large and small, are
perfectly played by an excellent cast. Of the two central roles, it’s perhaps
unfortunate that the filmmaker is less focused on Rana’s character,
particularly as one of the movie’s central themes concerns the treatment of
women in Iranian society. The fact that the increasingly imperious Emad is more
concerned about his “honour” than he is about his wife’s traumatised emotional
and psychological condition tells you all you need to know about the nature of
their relationship.
As the mystery begins to unfold, Farhadi
cleverly excludes authority figures such as the secular and religious police,
thereby subtly underlining their grip on society. With Rana realising that a
visit to the police would only increase her problems, it is left to Emad to
turn amateur detective in a bid to track down the man guilty of the offence.
This leads to the film’s final half-hour
that provides a gripping climax to the drama, and an artful knife thrust to the
heart of the marriage and the flaky foundations that underpin relations between
men and women in Iran.
A
Salesman opened at Cinema Nouveau, Gateway, on May
5. – Patrick Compton
Posts
