Review | Film review: The Salesman – an Iranian marriage falters in Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar winner

4/5 stars

An Iranian man’s convoluted attempt to track down his wife’s assailant morphs into an unexpected struggle to find his own moral centre in this riveting human drama, writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s second foreign-language Oscar winner – after A Separation , in 2012, became the first film from Iran to receive that award.

Shortly after theatre actor couple Emad and Rana (Shahab Hosseini and Taraneh Alidoosti, stars of Farhadi’s 2009 hit About Elly) move out of their structurally unsound Tehran apartment building, their marriage begins to show cracks also when Rana accidentally buzzes in a stranger at their new place, and suffers an unspecified assault as a result.

While his shaken wife recovers from a head wound, neither recalling details of the attack nor showing any incentive to involve the police, Emad, who is a teacher by day, learns that the flat was last occupied by a prostitute and her child. A smartphone and a pickup truck left behind by the intruder offer extra clues for Emad’s investigation.

Although it wouldn’t be wrong to say that The Salesman smacks of indiscreet symbolism – what with Emad and Rana playing Willy and Linda Loman in a stage production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, just as their relationship is crumbling outside – there are engrossing conflicts to be found in these characters’ motives.