The Salesman

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Featured at the Boston Festival of Films from Iran, January 18-29, Museum of Fine Arts http://www.mfa.org

Asghar Farhadi’s new film The Salesman is a dark and deep exploration of traumatic personal violation, and how it affects close relationships in the aftermath. Similar to his Oscar-winning The Separation (2011), in which the familiar human experience of divorce takes place within Iranian-Islamic culture, The Salesman examines the universal of “personal violation” within the same framework—characters view and deal with “female temptation” according to their traditions, but all humans share the same gut response to right and wrong.

As an audience, exploring the realm of personal violation isn’t a pleasant experience, but The Salesman’s fine craftsmanship makes it possible, from sympathetic characters, to compelling scene changes and suspense, to integrating Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, in which the two young protagonists—husband and wife actors Emad and Rana (Shahab Hosseini and Taraneh Alidoosti)—perform as Willy and Linda during the weeks of their “violation” ordeal.

The movie begins as Emad and Rana move into a new apartment found by their play’s director Babak (Babak Karimi), but it quickly evolves that the former tenant, whose belongings are still in a room waiting to be picked up, was a prostitute. The neighbors mention how glad they are she is gone. Emad angrily confronts Babak about knowingly sending them to a contaminated bedroom like that, and his outrage is one of the numerous manifestations of Iranian morality in the film.

As the couple unpacks and settles in, one of the prostitute’s clients (Mojgan) enters the apartment and gravely injures Rana while she’s taking a shower, but he does not rape her. In fact, her head injury, caused by his temptation of seeing her flesh, may have been accidental, because as flees the scene of broken glass and blood, he leaves her a wad of money in compensation. He also forgets his cell phone and car keys. The rest of the movie concerns how Rana, Emad, Babak, and the new neighbors deal in different ways with the terrifying violation that has occurred.

Islam’s view of women and modesty influences some of the characters’ reactions, as Rana and the neighbors don’t want to go to the police because that would cause the story to become public: Rana’s naked body exposed to a man, including a second man, the neighbor, who rescued her in her unconscious state. Rana, traumatized, has nowhere to go for psychological help for the same reason—shame, modesty—and her terror of being left alone is so acute that she follows Emad on his errands or to his day-job as a high school teacher; at first she is also too disoriented to resume her role of Linda in Death of a Salesman. Emad is her only source of succor, and she refuses to let him go to the police—his choice for dealing with the crime. Their relationship develops deep stress as a result. Since the police aren’t going to be the means for Emad to resolve his own sense of violation, he must deal with justice—and his burning feelings of revenge—on his own. His method of punishing the aging, ailing perpetrator Mojgan, whom he tracks down, follows cultural norms: he will force Mojgan to admit his guilt to his family—that shame and humiliation breaks the spirit.

The movie explores the psychological effects of violation but also of being a victim. Rana’s a victim, Emad’s a victim, and in the end the Mojgan is Emad’s victim. Ultimately, we viewers digest what we already know: how unresolvable the emotions of personal violation and victimization are. They live and churn relentlessly, destructively, within us; they distract and disorganize the mind and create misery. Revenge is longed for but it can’t alleviate horrific emotion and memory, nor can justice; no remedy exists for the broiling, excruciating turmoil inside the sufferer. In Rana’s case, choosing the path of forgiveness and mercy—an act of submission and letting the guilty go free—is the only salve that might give her back a life, but is it a perpetually haunted life?

Rana and Emad are not only permanently affected by violation and victimization, each in his and her own way, but they also can never be the same couple they once were. They might survive as a couple—that’s left ambiguous—but if they do, they are changed people. Emad is harder, almost a symbol of the regime’s moral authority—he no longer laughs easily with his students but holds them rigidly to the book; ironically, as an actor once in the opposition camp, he has become like the censors. Rana has become the vision of Mary in the Pietà. We feel as “Willy and Linda” look at each other on the stage in the movie’s last minutes that the true people within those characters are diametrically opposed. This juxtapositioning of a woman’s nature as forgiving and man’s as tougher not only reflects another Islamic belief but generally, and true to the movie as a whole, a universal trait.

This handsomely shot and crafted film is all gloom and doom, yet at the same time, it speaks of a classic human experience.