Asghar Farhadi’s Tehran drama about a couple, an intrusion and a stranger’s pickup truck grips hard for an hour and a half, then wants us to notice how closely it resembles the play its actors are performing. Worth your evening; not his best.
Asghar Farhadi’s films begin with something small and domestic, a divorce petition in A Separation, and keep digging until nobody in them is standing on solid ground. The Salesman starts with the ground itself. A Tehran block of flats cracks in the night because of a digger next door, and Emad Etesami (Shahab Hosseini) and his wife Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti), both actors in an amateur production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, have to find somewhere else to live. For ninety minutes this is as tight as anything he has made. Then he starts pointing at the play, and the film gets worse the harder he points.
Hossein Jafarian opens on an empty stage set, the Loman bedroom with its brass bed and neon sign, lights coming up on nobody. Then he is in a stairwell with a handheld camera while a building empties, a man carrying his grown son on his back. Hayedeh Safiyari cuts the evacuation quick and everything after it slow, so the new flat, offered by fellow cast member Babak (Babak Karimi), feels like a place to catch breath. It is not. The previous tenant has left her belongings behind a locked door and a child’s drawings on the wall, and the neighbours go quiet when she is mentioned.
The event the film turns on happens off screen. Rana, expecting Emad, buzzes open the street door and gets in the shower. Farhadi cuts from the buzzer to Emad coming up the stairs; there is blood on the steps, and a neighbour, Shirin Aghakashi’s Esmat, is already mopping. We were horrified, and he had shown us almost nothing: a bathroom, a door left open, red on concrete. Because we never see it, we do what Emad does for the rest of the film: imagine it. He also has a stranger’s pickup truck outside.
Hosseini plays Emad as a decent man going sour. The boys at his school like him; watch how that changes when he catches a pupil with a phone. Alidoosti plays Rana as someone who cannot stay in the flat alone, cannot say what happened, and flinches every time the buzzer goes. Hers is the harder performance and the film gives it less room. Most critics have noticed that the second hour follows the husband. Her fear is what he is angry about, and the film spends its time on his anger.
Sattar Oraki keeps his music almost entirely on the stage. The flat runs on fridge hum and traffic, and the play gets the strings. Sara Samiee dresses Rana in a grey wig as Linda Loman and a headscarf as herself, and there is a good joke in rehearsal when Mina Sadati’s Sanam has to play the Woman in Boston in a raincoat because the stage cannot show what the scene requires. The cast laugh. The film has just told us what it is about: what can be said aloud in this city and what cannot.
Emad searches for the man without the police, and the film is clear about why: a report means questions, and questions mean the neighbours find out. The middle stretch, Emad driving the truck round Tehran, Rana cooking a dinner he then refuses to eat, is the best of it. The last half hour is set almost entirely in one flat. We will not describe it, except to say that Farhadi has placed everyone in it so that an argument about shame and mercy can be had in full. The placing shows. Farid Sajjadi Hosseini gives the best performance in the film there, and even he cannot hide the carpentry.
The trouble is the play. Willy Loman is a proud man brought low, and Farhadi wants us to hold that next to Emad, so he cuts to the stage whenever the flat gets close to the point. Once would have done. By the end the parallels are drawn in thick pen, and A Separation, where everyone had a case, looks the better film for having trusted us more.
It runs 125 minutes and is a 12A. See it with someone you can argue with afterwards about what Emad should have done. You will not agree, and that is the part Farhadi got right.
