Revenge takes on a different dimension in Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s "The Salesman". It generates far-reaching consequences. A morally complex relationship drama on the surface, it’s essentially a mystery film in disguise. Farhadi’s equivalent of a Hitchcock film, if you will.
It all begins when a seemingly happy couple, Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and his wife Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti), move to a new place as their former apartment is on the verge of collapse due to construction work nearby. When the impact of the work causes cracks to appear on the walls, the tenants, fearing for their lives, are forced to evacuate.
Life in their new apartment is violently disrupted when an unknown intruder barges in while Emad is away. Rana becomes a victim of his attack – the nature and extent of which isn’t quite clear, but we assume that it is still bad enough to shake both of them up. She survives a serious head injury, and Emad starts looking for potential clues and immediate answers. He finds some old socks on the floor and a wad of cash on a cupboard.
He eventually deduces that this has something to do with the former tenant – a prostitute – whose belongings are still in one of the rooms. She hasn’t come to pick them up yet. Apparently, the intruder came in expecting her, made quite a mess and fled when he realised that it was someone else. Emad’s persistence in finding answers and meting out justice puts a strain on their marriage. She is tired and wants to put all this behind her, but he isn't willing to let go.
The 'cracks' begin to appear in the new home too, only this time they are invisible. Since the man and wife also happen to be actors in a play – Arthur Miller’s "Death of a Salesman" – the domestic strife badly impacts their performances too. When the culprit is finally discovered, we are slightly taken aback because we expected a different kind of revelation, but it shouldn’t be surprising considering the world in which we live. What Farhadi has constructed here is something worth debating and pondering over.
How would you react if you were in Emad’s place and saw the state of man you are dealing with? His decision is swift, but it might take much longer for us to come up with something sensible and, above all, just! Would you still be resilient and pursue justice, even if it puts your marriage in jeopardy? The Salesman is one of the tensest and emotionally challenging pieces of cinema I’ve ever seen.
In a way, "The Salesman" shares a slight resemblance — in terms of mood — to Farhadi's 2009 film, "About Elly," in which the sudden disappearance of a young woman creates considerable measure of chaos in the lives of everyone close to her. The Salesman, too, involves an absent woman becoming the catalyst for the ensuing incidents, albeit indirectly. Interestingly, Taraneh Alidoosti, who plays Rana, played the titular missing woman in "About Elly".