OVP: The Salesman (2016)

Film: The Salesman (2016)
Stars: Shahab Hosseini, Taraneh Alidoosti, Babak Karimi, Farid Sajadhosseini
Director: Asghar Farhadi
Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Foreign Language Film-Iran*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

The Trump administration at this point feels like an eternity, doesn't it?  Somehow we're not even a year into his reign of terror, and as a result certain indignities that would have marred an entire administration in the past have become "oh yeah" types of situations.  But remember, if you will, that in the height of Trump's first attempt at a travel ban back in January, one of the results was that Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi was not allowed to attend the Academy Awards, where he was nominated for directing one of the Foreign Language Film contenders, The Salesman.  While The Salesman was definitely toward the top of the list of movies that might make a play for the Oscar, up until that moment, I had expected the more lauded Toni Erdmann to grab the trophy.  Afterwards, though, it felt like Hollywood had the perfect chance to send a message to a president they despised by voting for a director he'd literally banned from the country, and so The Salesman ended up winning in one of the night's most political moments.  I've thought for months now about whether or not this win was actually warranted as it was truly the best movie of the five, or whether it was more a win in the way of sending Trump an "F-U" from the Academy.  So I went into this movie with a lot more questions than I normally would a recently released picture whose plot/stars I know very little regarding.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film centers around an affluent acting couple who are putting on a production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.  The movie alternates between the play, occasionally feeling like we're actually watching Death of a Salesman (there are scenes that open on the play already in progress, without the veil of them being the characters), and real-life, where they are struggling to find a place to live after their apartment building collapses.  They move into an apartment, which they later learn previously housed a prostitute, and one night the wife Rana (Alidoosti) is assaulted by an unknown man, one whom we are left to assume was a client of the prostitute's.

The film unfolds as a type of psychological drama after this, as Rana becomes increasingly reliant on her husband Emad (Hosseini) for everything in her life, while Emad, who is frustrated at his once independent wife becomes afraid of the world, tries to find the man who assaulted her.  Eventually he finds him, and to the shock of most of the audience he's not a young criminal, but a senior citizen who claims that he simply startled Rana, not actually assaults her.  Things escalate with Emad locking the old man in an abandoned apartment room and trying to out his crimes to his family, and then the old man has a heart attack of sorts and nearly dies.  The film ends with Rana forcing Emad to not make the man confess, threatening him with divorce if he does, but Emad cannot help himself to strike the old man, who then goes into another heart episode as the film closes, with Rana and Emad wordlessly leaving the theater.

The film in a lot of ways recalls Farhadi's magnum opus A Separation, though it so liberally borrows from it that occasionally the shock of that original picture doesn't come across quite as well here.  The frustrations between Emad and Rana, for example, don't come to much of a head and feel underplayed more out of an under-developed script than out of cinematic ambience.  Still, Farhadi is a master of mood, and there are moments that are terribly gripping in the picture, particularly in some of the climactic scenes where you realize that Emad is so far under the spell of his rage and scorned masculinity that you think he's willing to sacrifice his marriage to defend his wife.  The movie needs more of this bizarre pull, and less of the meandering push to shove the parallels between Miller's play and our onscreen drama together.  All-in-all, it's the best movie I've seen nominated that year so far, but I have to believe they might have gone in a different direction without Trump, as Farhadi had made a similar (and better) movie five years previously.

Those are my thoughts on The Salesman-how about you?  I will confess it doesn't age as well in my mind (I saw it a few weeks ago), so for those who have had a lot of time to percolate with the picture, what did you think?  And what film would you have voted for in the 2016 Foreign Film Oscar lineup?  Share below!