Emad (Shahab Hosseini) is a well liked high school teacher who has good rapport with his students while still managing to keep discipline in the classroom. He and his wife, Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti), are currently performing as the leads in the Arthur Miller play, Death Of A Salesman. They live in a multi-story apartment building in the city. Due to an excavation project in the adjacent lot, the building's tenants have to evacuate hurriedly before their structure collapses. With warning signals blaring, windows breaking and the plaster walls crumbling, Emad sends Rana ahead to safety while he heroically carries an incapacitated neighbor down the stairwell. Thus it is established that Emad, highly regarded teacher and good neighbor extraordinaire, is an admirable man, above reproach.
The Miller play's director
and fellow actor Babak (Babak Karimi) offers to let the now-homeless
couple stay in an apartment he owns which has just been vacated by the
previous tenant. The only "rule" is that they are forbidden to open the
locked closet in which that previous tenant has temporarily stored
personal belongings. Shades of the Garden Of Eden's forbidden fruit?
Emad and Rana soon learn that previous tenant was a prostitute, a fact
which may come into play in an unfortunate way for them.
One
evening when Rana is alone in their new quarters, she is attacked in
her bathroom. The perpetrator, after cutting his feet on shattered
mirror glass, runs away quickly, leaving bloody prints on the outdoor
staircase. Not long afterwards, Emad comes home to find his wife beaten
and unconscious. She is taken by ambulance to a hospital. Although
she recovers she is traumatized, afraid to be alone. The couple decides
not to get the police involved, possibly because Rana can't recall what
her attacker looked like and because she doesn't want to relive the
ordeal via testimony.
Emad and Rana begin to
discover clues: a stash of money in a cabinet, a cell phone and a set of
keys, all of which have been left -- the last two unintentionally -- by
the assailant. Emad tries to use the keys to enter and start several
vehicles parked in their neighborhood. When he finds the match, he
covertly parks the vehicle out of sight in his building's underground
garage.
Farhadi is a master at building
suspense. Are things deteriorating between the married couple? Why
won't Babak tell Emad how to reach the previous tenant? Maybe the
attacker, who had approached Rana from behind on that awful night,
thought she was that prostitute. In classroom scenes, why does the
camera concentrate on a particular boy with black-framed glasses?
There
are several scenes where Farhadi films the play starring Emad and
Rana. Showing a play (or a movie) within the "main" film is usually
tricky, but Farhadi manages to do so smoothly. There is never any
question as to whether we are watching Death Of A Salesman or The Salesman.
This leads us to another train of thought. In Miller's tragic play the
salesman, Willy Loman, expires in the final act. Are we, the viewers,
to expect the same fate for Emad, who has the role of Loman in the
play?
The final act, which includes themes of
shame, humiliation, morality and forgiveness, begins when we don't
realize it's beginning. Similarly, the story doesn't stop at the moment
we think is the end. There is more than one surprise in store, which
accounts for the final stages being a little too drawn out. That
criticism arguably falls into the category of a "nit." The Salesman
may not be quite up to the level of the two previous Farhadi films cited
above, but it is nevertheless worthy of your time and money. Last week
it won the Academy Award Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
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