“I know it when I walk down the street. They seem to laugh at me. They just pass me by.”
~ Emad as Willy Loman
At first, An Iranian acting company producing Death of a Salesman seems like an odd choice, because Arthur Miller’s play is an icon of Americana. For those who don’t know, Death of a Salesman (1949) is about a depressed salesman named Willy Loman, whose years of disappointments have begun to blur his past from his present and uncloak family schisms. The way I remember learning about Death of a Salesman is that it’s a classic because it dissects traditional American values, such as the American Dream and faith in postwar capitalism. However, director Asghar Farhadi beautifully incorporates Miller’s play into The Salesman, and places a unique reimagining of what it means to be a “Salesman.”
The Salesman (2016) is about the decaying relationship between a schoolteacher, Emad (Shahab Hosseini), and his wife Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti), who are also actors at a Tehrani theatre company producing Death of a Salesman. The uprooting of their lives begins with Emad being hastily woken to his neighbors banging on his door and panicked tenants fleeing the building. In a stunning one-shot scene, the camera follows Emad moving from room-to-room, yelling out the windows to neighbors if they know what’s wrong—is it an earthquake? Fire? No, it’s unannounced construction nearby, which is causing the apartment building’s foundation to collapse.
Emad and Rana are forced to relocate. They move into an apartment owned by a fellow actor in Death of a Salesman, Babak (Babak Karimi), except all the previous tenant’s belongings are still there. Babak explains that he had been trying to contact the woman for a while now, but she hasn’t returned his calls. They decide to leave most of her things outside by the front steps.
The first part of The Salesman is admittedly slow. I wouldn’t say boring, but every step is carefully measured out and it isn’t until the half-hour marker that the audiences is introduced to the main conflict. Until that point, it’s a steady process of figuring out what kind of person Emad is. He’s a patient, thoughtful man who is respected by his students and a passionate actor who sometimes struggles with Iranian censorship regulations on theatre. But then a striking, instigating event rattles his household, and like a construction crane shaking a building, the reverberations start to uproot all his relationships.
The Salesman and Death of a Salesman are a perfect pairing together because Emad and Willy Loman share similar flaws that eventually lead to their demise. The biggest one is that they both seem to be more concerned with what society thinks of them over their own family. For Emad’s part, he and Rana are both struggling to recover from their trauma. With incredible acting performances from Hosseini and Alidoosti, we see subtle but powerful changes in them as Emad grows increasingly aggressive while Rana becomes more reserved.
The “Salesman” in Arthur Miller’s play is someone who is sold on the idea that hard work is enough to receive a superficial recognition from society. Whereas Farhadi’s “Salesman” is someone who sells himself the idea that justice and vengeance are interchangeable. As Emad searches for a specific reason or person to blame for the instigating event, his actions slowly split from justified anger to obsessive fury. The gradual unfolding works beautifully, because I felt equal parts sympathetic and horrified at Emad.
There are a few lines that are probably lost in translation with the English subtitles, and if I was more knowledgeable of the subtleties in Iranian culture—such as Iranian censorship or relational norms between husband/wife and teacher/student—I think I would have enjoyed it even more. As it is, The Salesman is truly an international film for its complex insight into what it means to have empathy and forgiveness for even those who hurt us the most.
Rating: A- | 4 stars
