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Oscar-nominated Iranian drama ‘The Salesman’ puts its characters through emotional trauma

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The Salesmen.

Three and a half stars

The Salesman Shahab Hosseini, Taraneh Alidoosti, Babak Karimi. Directed by Asghar Farhadi. Rated PG-13. Opens Friday at Regal Downtown Summerlin.

As he proved in his acclaimed movies The Past and A Separation (which won the 2012 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film), Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi is an expert at putting characters through slow-burn emotional torment, with small everyday traumas adding up to massive, life-changing disasters. The trauma at the center of Farhadi’s new Oscar-nominated drama The Salesman is certainly not small, although Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) attempts to minimize it, to the frustration of her husband Emad (Shahab Hosseini). Shortly after the couple has moved into a new apartment, Rana is attacked in the shower by a visitor looking for the apartment’s previous tenant, a woman strongly implied to be a sex worker. Suffering from a head injury, Rana insists on returning to life as normal, but Emad becomes consumed with finding the man who hurt his wife.

The specific nature of the attack is never made clear, either by Rana or by the movie, and it’s obvious that the potential stigma associated with sexual assault motivates that lack of disclosure. Farhadi is sensitive to the cultural standards that value honor and decorum, while also using the story to demonstrate their potentially devastating consequences. Rana’s refusal to call the police or tell anyone the details of what happened, along with Emad’s determination to defend his wife’s honor (and, by extent, his own), combine to nearly destroy their relationship, all in the name of doing what they perceive as the right thing (or at least the expected thing). The movie’s final act, an uncomfortable slowly building confrontation full of unbearable tension, can be difficult to watch, even if the vengeance being dished out is mild and subdued compared to a Hollywood revenge thriller.

Throughout the film, Rana and Emad are playing the lead roles in a production of Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, from which the movie draws its title, and the frequent visits to the theater suggest that Farhadi means to connect Miller’s story with his own. Those thematic parallels are sometimes a bit tenuous, and ultimately there isn’t as much resonance between the two works as the looming presence of the play would suggest. Still, both examine the sometimes suffocating nature of family responsibility, and both lead inexorably toward satisfyingly downbeat endings.

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