With Iran back in the headlines these days, it’s an especially opportune time for the release of “The Salesman,” the latest film from Iran’s most well-known director, Asghar Farhadi. In fact, Farhadi recently made news when he said that he would not attend this year’s Academy Awards in light of President Trump’s executive order regarding immigration and travel even though “The Salesman” is nominated in the foreign-language-film category.
But those unfamiliar with Farhadi’s work shouldn’t get the wrong idea. His films, such as “About Elly” (2009) and the Oscar-winning “A Separation” (2011), don’t deal explicitly with politics or Iran’s troubled relations with the U.S. Instead, he turns his focus on middle-class and lower middle-class Iranians and their relationships with each other, lending those outside Iran a glimpse beyond the cable-TV news bulletins, into a fascinating society trapped between a conservative Islamic hierarchy/bureaucracy and Western sensibilities.
In “The Salesman,” Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) are a married couple and actors involved in a production of “The Death of a Salesman,” Arthur Miller’s classic American play about the American Dream. But when we meet them, it’s not onstage but it’s as they’re escaping their apparently shabbily constructed apartment building that’s collapsing around them.
With their home uninhabitable, a fellow cast member says he knows of an apartment they can rent. The place seems perfect — except that the previous tenant has left much of her stuff there. If Emad and Rana could peer into the future, they would take that as a sign that maybe they should keep looking but beggars — and actors — can’t be choosers so they move in.
