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Prizewinner at the Cannes Film Festival, Iranian Asghar Farhadi's new film offers a dizzying moral exploration in which the evidence of judgment is unveiled.
By Arnaud Schwartz | France
The Salesman by Asghar Farhadi
In 2011, Iranian Asghar Farhadi gained meteoric international recognition with A Separation. Following his beautiful adventure of The Past in 2013, this 44-year-old native of Ispahan province, returned to Iran to work on The Salesman, which took the prizes for best male actor and screenplay at this year's Cannes Film Festival.
A couple whose life is overturned
Once again, the filmmaker explores themes that are dear to him beginning with the relationships between men and women in Teheran today. Here he introduces us to a thirty-year-old couple moving in the cultural worlds of teaching and a passion for the theater. Forced to move house hastily after construction works weakened their building, Emad and Rana, shift between two performances of The Death of a Salesman into an apartment located for them by a friend.
Although this misadventure does not trouble them any further, hardly have they moved than Rana falls victim to an assault that overturns both their lives and shakes the foundations of their relationship. Emad encourages Rana to lodge a complaint. But Rana prefers not to do so, fearing the need to justify her to the police. So Emad himself begins to search for the aggressor transforming it into a personal quest...
"In order to understand who is guilty, we need to listen to all the characters"
A talented screenwriter, sobre and effective director as well as a remarkable manipulator of actors, Asghar Farhadi is above all a very subtle observer of the meanderings of human nature. Given Farhadi's predilection for foibles, guilt and responsibility from a multitude of moral points of view, it is no accident that the play in which the couple are performing is that of Arthur Miller in which a tired old man loses himself between dignity and forgiveness.
The filmmaker, who never accepts ready made answers, has no peer in putting spectators to work, forcing them to evolve in their perceptions of one or the other characters depending on the situations in which they are involved.
"To understand who is guilty of what, we need to listen to all the characters," he notes. "The justifications of one can impact on the judgment of the other. The more information that one has, the better one understands that a person is not completely guilty.
"Each one has good reasons to act as he does, and what complicates matters even further is the fact that these reasons are very often unconscious at the moment that the acts are committed," Farhadi says.
Morality, hate, fear, frustration
Why does Emad, under his neighbors' eyes, seek to make the assault a personal campaign, almost to the point of forgetting that he is not the first victim? Why is he incapable of effecting his desire for vengeance earlier in the film? Why does he suddenly find himself guided by the desire to humiliate the presumed author of the facts in front of his family? Why does his wife feel moved by another emotion at that very moment?
Between morality and psychology, hate, fear, frustration and compassion, Asghar Farhadi fascinatingly decrypts a sequence of actions and reactions, all linked to those that precede them as well as and above all in the context that gave birth to them. The fabric of the story evidently takes on a particular relief here, since it involves Iran, but the reflection to which The Salesman challenges us has a much more universal dimension.
A complex Iranian reality
Far from any relativism, the filmmaker is no less subversive in his refusal to cling to the most reassuring evidence in order to better illustrate the basis – or the absence thereof – of the judgment that one makes of the other. The displacement to which he invites the viewer is as salutary as it is intelligently drawn out, thanks in particular to the interplay between the two main actors, Shahab Hosseini, who was awarded the best male actor prize at Cannes, and who has become one of the most popular actors in Iran, and the no less deserving Taraneh Alidoosti.
Contrary to many of his confreres who have been forced into exile, Asghar Farhadi illustrates the figure of an Iranian filmmaker pursuing a brilliant career in his own country, choosing difficult themes despite an official censorship even if slightly loosened but under high surveillance from a very virulent minority.
As in his films, this Iranian reality is not simply binary.
"My purpose is to address myself to all, including the members of the censorship commission, who are also human beings," he says.
"If after a quarter of an hour, I succeed in causing them to forget that they are there to identify whatever poses a problem for them, and let themselves be carried away by the film, so much the better. That's what interests me: To include them in the public."
Asghar Farhadi, a major talent
1972: Born in Khomeynishahr. Studies theatre.
2003: Dancing in the Dust, first full-length feature film.
2004 : The Beautiful City.
2011: A Separation. Nearly a million viewers in France. Golden Bear and double prize for best actors in Berlin. César and Oscar for best foreign film.
2013: The Past, shot in France, prize for best actor (Bérénice Bejo) and ecumenical prize in Cannes.
2016 : The Salesman, prizes for best actor and screenplay at Cannes.
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