With every shot, our sympathies flicker and tilt. What follows, in the final half hour of the movie, is an astounding chamber piece, worthy of Strindberg, with the husband, the wife, and her aggressor stuck in a dance of doubt and death. When the culprit is revealed at last, he sidles inadvertently into view, and the figure that he cuts, to Emad’s consternation, could not conform less to the image of a lecherous fiend. He locates the intruder’s pickup truck and tracks him down. Little by little, Emad-bearded and reflective, the grain of his anxiety finely conveyed by Shahab Hosseini-turns into an amateur sleuth. We don’t see a single cop, let alone a lawyer or a cleric, yet by their very absence we sense their clamp on society: a clever move by Farhadi, who shows nothing that could vex Iranian censors but whose intent is nonetheless caustic and precise. Western viewers, watching “A Separation,” which dealt with divorce and the care of an elderly parent, had to keep pace with an unfamiliar legal system as they went along, but the path taken by “The Salesman” is less public and more oblique. Shame inflicts a secondary blow reputations can be broken as easily as skulls. The woman is the guilty party until proved innocent.
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There would be a trial and all kinds of stories.” So that’s it. A neighbor tells her that, in regard to her assailant, “you’ll have to justify letting him in. “I don’t want to have to tell it in front of everybody,” she says, and her fellow-citizens agree that doing nothing is the smartest option. When Emad suggests going to the police, his wife demurs. An American woman, taken to a hospital-as Rana is-to have her injury treated, would be asked about the circumstances, and law enforcement would be called. What matters is what does not happen next. Was a sexual offense committed, too? Was there even an attack, or did she stumble and fall in fear? She never caught sight of her attacker, nor did we. Beyond those brute facts, though, everything blurs. (Michael Haneke, the maker of “Funny Games” and “Hidden,” would surely commend such lingering.) By the time Emad arrives, there is blood in the stairwell, and Rana has been wounded in the head. As the gaze of the camera lingers on that door, ajar, we realize that someone else is coming. Rana, taking a shower, leaves the apartment door open for her husband, who is due home. One of those acquaintances brings trouble.
“She lived a wild life,” a neighbor remarks. “A woman with lots of acquaintances,” we are told. de Winter, in “Rebecca,” she hovers over the action. We never meet her, but, like the first Mrs. “If we could only raze it all and start again.” Sounds like a failed marriage.) Needing somewhere else in a hurry, Emad and Rana move into another apartment, recently vacated the previous tenant has left a roomful of stuff. (“What a disaster, this town,” Emad says. Residents are told to leave the building, which is listing and shifting because of construction work next door.
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A fracture appears in a bedroom wall of their apartment windows crack without being touched, as if by hostile magic. The Etesamis’ problems start and end at home, a place that soon becomes untenable. If, when he falls asleep in class one day, they grab the chance to take pictures of him with their cell phones, well, what high-school kid, anywhere in the world, could refuse such a gift?
From what we observe, too, Emad seems pretty good at his day job his pupils, boys in their teens, engage freely in classroom discussion. Unlike the Lomans, however, the Etesamis have no children-no Happy or Biff to tighten the screws of disappointment. By a pleasing symmetry, Willy’s wife, Linda, is played by Emad’s wife, Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti). These questions of intimacy and respect, and of how both can be violated, beat at the heart of “The Salesman.” The role of Willy Loman is taken by Emad Etesami (Shahab Hosseini), a part-time actor who also works as a teacher.
Americans make a play at being very intimate very quickly, which seems disrespectful sometimes to people who aren’t used to instant emotional closeness. People don’t address parents quite the way Americans do, and there is also a question of intimacy.
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