The use of Arthur Miller’s most famous play as both a diegetic production and clear textual reference point in The Salesman is almost too on the nose. As in A Separation, Asghar Farhadi’s film deals with a couple gradually torn apart by their mounting inability to recognize the other. The opening shots raise the lights on the skeletal set being used for Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana’s (Taraneh Alidoosti) Miller production before transitioning to the couple’s own flat, which the two must abruptly flee in the middle of the night when nearby construction weakens the building’s foundation so much that the place begins to crack and collapse. As far as introductions go, it’s a nearly complete illustration of the coming narrative and thematic strife.
Farhadi wastes little time arriving at the core rupture of the film. The couple relocates to a dingy apartment that a friend gets them for cheap, and as the landlord tours them around, neighbors pull him aside and make nervous, vague reference to the previous tenant of their unit and concerns about this new couple’s suitability. That mild tension is brought to a head one night when Rana heads home early and, about to get in the shower, hears the intercom and, assuming it is Emad, buzzes him in and cracks open the door, which Farhadi remains trained on as it ominously, arduously creaks open. Farhadi stages this entire sequence as a thriller, capped off by Emad returning home to find faint splotches of blood leading up and into his apartment before the frame smash cuts to the hospital where doctors are sewing up a grisly wound on his wife’s forehead.
The contrast of the gentle, even aimless beginning and the dark, unsettling atmosphere of this close to the first act prefigures the rest of the film, which applies the latter tone to an attempted return to normalcy. The first rehearsal we see of Death of a Salesman concerns the scene in which Biff discovers his father’s infidelity, the moment of complete breakdown in the play. Here, however, the actor playing Biff cracks up, ruining what is the most stomach-wrenching moment of the entire text. Alone, it’s an innocuous scene, a reflection of that line actors must walk between their ability to faithfully capture the emotions of a piece and the occasionally amusing disorientation of knowing it is all fake. However in context it seems a reflection of a darker world, or at least one that is freer to be more honest about the many dangers that can affect a relationship. In Miller’s play, Willy’s affair with a woman of “ill repute” shatters the façade of his traditional life; here, that woman is a specter, the previous occupant of the couple’s flat who indirectly brings ruin in the form of the john who came to the apartment looking for her and found Rana. Given the violence that follows, something that was once as scandalous as infidelity looks comically quaint.
Farhadi spends the immediate aftermath of the attack focusing on Rana’s trauma as she falls apart in previews and cannot even use the bathroom in the apartment without Emad standing guard. Shortly thereafter, however, the focus shifts to Emad, visualizing not only Rana’s catatonic stasis and retreat but also the way that the man gradually makes his wife’s trauma all about himself. Emad is established as a quiet, liberal sort of person: a teacher during the day who enjoys a light-hearted rapport with his students and who shows off his genial and generous nature in the first scene by not hesitating to carry an old woman’s disabled son out of the collapsing apartment building. After Rana’s assault, however, he struggles mightily with his perceived responsibility as a husband, regularly devolving into fits of rage and even going on a manhunt for his wife’s attacker.
Emad’s vengeance builds to the final act, wherein he discovers the assailant and then engages in cruel games that sidestep justice for the chance to make the man as humiliated as he himself feels. Much of the action in the last section of the film is restricted to the apartment where Emad traps the man, turning the film into its own single-set play where characters enter and exit a fixed position and the tone shifts with each new configuration of people. Some aspects of this falling action are limiting—Rana enters toward the end and plays the stereotypical role of the forgiver in response to Emad’s masculine overdrive—but for the most part Farhadi’s gift for the ambiguity at the heart of moral absolutism is played out as a horror film in which sympathy slowly teeters over to the attacker solely on the basis of Emad’s unyielding fury. The opening section shows the way that the literal progress of development in Iran erodes the foundations of the couple’s building. The finale, however, suggests that the enduring strength of social foundations may be the core of the problem, that what is built on top of them can be so easily demolished to reveal the unrefined, wrathful presence that was covered.
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