Forushande
Asghar Farhadi (2016)
In The Salesman, as in each of Asghar Farhadi’s previous three films, there’s a pivotal event which isn’t shown on screen but is either alleged or assumed to have taken place. The event is probed repeatedly in what follows. The main characters of Farhadi’s latest, like those of About Elly and A Separation, are youngish, educated and middle-class: Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti), a husband and wife, are theatre actors in Tehran, where Emad also teaches literature part-time in a boys’ school. At the start of the film, the couple are preparing to play Willy and Linda Loman in a production of Death of a Salesman. A few days before the play opens, they’re forced, along with the other residents, to evacuate their apartment block. It’s no longer safe to live there because of subsidence and power failures, caused by work being done on the foundations of an adjoining building. Babak (Babak Karimi), a fellow actor, offers Emad and Rana an apartment which he owns and rents out, and which has recently been vacated. The couple move in. On the opening night of Death of a Salesman, they make their way home separately, Rana arriving first. She’s about to have a shower when the entry buzzer sounds. Assuming it’s her husband, she opens the door to the apartment and returns to the bathroom. When Emad returns sometime later, there is blood on the stairs and the apartment is empty. He finds Rana in a local hospital with a head wound. This is superficial but the frightening circumstances in which it occurred have cut deeper. Rana tells Emad she was in the shower when she felt a hand touching her head. Startled, then horrified to discover the hand wasn’t Emad’s, she screamed and struggled, hitting her head on the side of the shower. She barely saw the intruder, who quickly left the apartment.
When a character in a movie is an actor playing a part on stage, one tends to expect life-on-screen to start imitating art: A Double Life syndrome. There are resonances with Arthur Miller’s play in The Salesman but, so far as I could tell, they’re not major – and certainly not enough to foretell what will happen in Farhadi’s film. Of greater impact, at any rate, is the fact that this is an Iranian production of Death of a Salesman – in other words, something culturally unexpected. As the story progresses, however, the liberal-minded and relatively emancipated people in it are shown to be (as they were in A Separation) trapped in the conventions and inequalities that govern life in Iran more generally. When she’s taken to hospital, Rana isn’t asked by medical staff how she sustained her injury; nor does she want to report the incident to the police. Although Emad thinks she should, others in the apartment building share Rana’s view. As one of their female neighbours puts it, ‘You’d have to justify letting him in. There would be a trial and all kinds of stories’. Anxiety on this score is sharpened by the revelation that the previous tenant of the apartment was a prostitute who, according to the neighbours, had plenty of male guests. (This never-seen woman is a continuing presence, and not only because the intruder is assumed to be one of her clients: the apartment still contains her clothes and other possessions.) Rana’s refusal to involve the police impels Emad to do his own detective work (although the show also must go on: the performances at the theatre continue). At first, his pursuit of justice seems an understandable, even a reasonable, alternative to the formal legal route that Rana so fears. But Emad becomes increasingly obsessed with tracking down the culprit. We begin to suspect that, though he loves Rana and is concerned for her wellbeing, the husband considers the manhandling of his wife to be harmful chiefly to his self-esteem, offensive to himself more than to her.
On the night of the incident, the trespasser departed so hurriedly that he left behind not just bloodstains in the stairwell but other clues to his identity: a wad of cash, keys and, in the apartment building’s parking area, a white van. The vehicle subsequently disappears from the parking lot but Emad traces it and identifies the owner. When they moved from their old apartment, Emad and Rana left stuff behind; Emad pays the van owner, a young man called Majid (Mojtaba Pirzadeh), to transport these things to the new apartment. Emad is frustrated when Majid doesn’t turn up at the old apartment building but instead sends his prospective father-in-law, Naser (Farid Sajadhosseini), who has a bad heart but is doing the job because he’s short of funds. In the course of the lengthy conversation that follows, Emad discovers that the right man has turned up after all. The ailing senior citizen, in spite of his denials, was Rana’s unexpected visitor.
This encounter and the events that follow – with a Saturday matinee of the Miller play an intermission between the two – make for gripping, claustrophobic drama. Emad locks Naser into a confined space in the apartment while he’s at the theatre. He then returns with Rana and arranges for the old man’s family to join the party. Rana, horrified by Naser’s physical condition and distress, warns her husband that their marriage will be at an end if he insists on telling all to Naser’s wife, daughter and son-in-law-to-be. This climax is cleverly constructed: Emad won’t expose Naser for fear of losing Rana; Naser won’t tell his family that he’s been held hostage for fear of what Emad might then reveal. A shocking consequence of their shared reticence is that Naser’s family, assuming they’ve been called to a medical emergency, express gratitude to Emad for saving the old man’s life. Before they depart, Emad asks to speak in private to Naser to ‘settle accounts’. He returns to him the money etc that was left in the couple’s apartment. Emad also hits Naser, a single blow that’s enough to bring on another collapse as he’s taking his leave. By the time an ambulance arrives, it’s too late. In the film’s final scene, Emad and Rana are back at the theatre, making up for their next show there.
Cracks in a building, the legacy of things left behind after a hurried departure, keeping quiet, public performance: these motifs of The Salesman make it easy to interpret the film as political metaphor. Asghar Farhadi has few peers in world cinema as a creator of modern morality tales that see characters dealing with personal dilemmas in ways strongly influenced by the larger cultural forces operating in the society they live in. Farhadi’s persuasive naturalistic style both helps to give his work believability and guards against portentousness. Yet although his talents are all strongly in evidence in this latest film, I found an increasing conflict between the story and the realistic telling of it. This could just be me being dim but there were bits of plotting I didn’t get. How is the white van retrieved from the parking lot? Since the vehicle is owned by Majid but was used by Naser on the night of the shower incident, didn’t the van’s disappearance for several days become an issue between the two men? There’s a similar lack of curiosity on the part of Naser’s family as to where he’s got to on the Saturday afternoon (the job of moving Emad and Rana’s things presumably wasn’t expected to take many hours). A bigger problem with The Salesman, however, is that Emad’s extreme behaviour in the closing stages – especially his brutal disregard for Naser’s state of health – strains credibility, even if we’re meant to think that Emad’s anger is greater as a consequence of the culprit’s being a shabby, overweight old man. The problem is magnified because Shahab Hosseini’s fine characterisation has made Emad so thoroughly convincing: it’s therefore more unacceptable for him to turn implausible.
Farhadi raises but leaves hanging the question of Emad and Rana’s childlessness, and the suggestion that they have different feelings about starting a family. When they first move to the new apartment and chat with Babak about how long they might stay there, Emad suggests the place may be too small if two become three but Rana seems to pooh-pooh the idea. This hint at prior tensions in the marriage is reinforced by Taraneh Alidoosti’s playing of Rana, which intermittently suggests an odd indifference towards Emad – before the incident that has such a dramatically distancing effect on their relationship. There’s an excellent scene in which the couple share a supper she’s made, with the young son of one of the other actors in Death of a Salesman. The light-hearted atmosphere and conciliatory promise of the meal vanish, suddenly and upsettingly, when Emad realises that the ingredients were bought with the cash the intruder left in the apartment (Rana didn’t know this when she did the shopping). The change of mood from the first to the second of two sequences showing Emad in his teaching work is achieved by less subtle means but both three sequences are effective, even so. When they find out about his theatre role, the schoolboys nickname Emad ‘the salesman’. The film’s title eventually refers to a second character. Emad’s interrogation of Naser includes the question of how he normally makes a living. The answer: ‘I sell clothes by the roadside in the evening’.
26 February 2017
