Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman Channels Arthur Miller

Using Arthur Miller’s 1949 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Death of a Salesman as a show within a movie and some of its plot devices as touchstones for a modern-day story would be a tough balancing act for even the best American independent filmmakers.

Leave it to Iranian master Asghar Farhadi to show us how it is done in The Salesman, which he wrote and directed; it is a nominee for a Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award from his country, where the compelling drama is known as Forushande.

The SalesmanDeath of a Salesman connections may seem subtle given the respective plots.

In the movie, a young couple played by Shahab Hosseini and Taraneh Alidoosti—you know him from Farhadi’s 2012 Best Foreign Language Oscar winner A Separation, her from Farhadi’s Fireworks Wednesday, and both from Farhadi’s About Elly—move into a new apartment in Tehran, where Emad works by day as a teacher and by night, alongside his wife Rana, as a community theater actor.

They are unaware that the apartment and its previous tenant have a past until a sudden eruption of violence strikes, straining their relationship and Rana’s participation in the couple’s latest stage production, Death of a Salesman. It sets Emad out for revenge, but his emotionally scarred wife wants no part of it.

In case you haven’t seen Death of a Salesman or weren’t forced to read it in high school, it’s about the existential crisis faced by washed-up traveling salesman Willy Loman, who returns home to his wife and two sons at age 63 with not much to show for his years on the road. He looks back on the good times—or what he now perceives to have been the good times—in flashbacks that eventually prove haunting as his lifelong dreams and time on Earth slip away.

As Farhadi’s multilayered story simmers to a boil, thanks largely to the effective performances of Hosseini and Alidoosti, you can be forgiven for missing the not-so-obvious Death of a Salesman parallels as you focus instead on the mystery at The Salesman‘s core as well as what is being revealed about Iranian censorship and gender roles. But it’s worth remembering that some critics accused Miller’s play of harboring Marxist sympathies with its characters’ varying interpretations of the American dream.

The play and the movie wallow in betrayal, humiliation, and life and death. Yet, these connections are not forced; they flow organically in The Salesman. Right after a Death of a Salesman rehearsal scene featuring a loose woman character is when Emad learns of the real loose woman who will soon cast a shadow over his marriage.

Though Emad is in a tight spot financially, he rejects assistance offered by his landlord, Babak (Babak Karimi of Farhadi’s A Separation and The Past), who also plays Charley in the Tehran Death of a Salesman production. In the play, Charley repeatedly offers Willy a job, even after he loses the sales gig, but Willy turns him down every time.

Farhadi uses that scene from the stage for dual purposes: to slyly expose the actors’ real-life connections to the fictional characters and to overtly demonstrate that the landlord has pissed off his friend and new tenant.

The filmmaker has admitted in interviews that it is no coincidence an older couple that figures into the last quarter of The Salesman have lived together for 35 years, as did Willy and Linda Loman, who are played onstage by Emad and Rana.

Indeed, after valiantly trying every night to understand and humanize the Willy Loman of the play, Emad unwittingly meets the real Willy Loman. The frail Iranian version’s job? Hawking clothing out of the back of a truck. Yep, he’s a salesman.

The Salesman is another fascinating, original work by one of the world’s most talented directors, although I must confess to one moment that made me cringe. It was when the action onscreen brought to mind one of those tense Asian or European thrillers that Hollywood invariably remakes. Poorly.

Since Arthur Miller never wrote a comic book or graphic novel, we may be safe.

The Salesman was written and directed by Asghar Farhadi; and stars Shahab Hosseini, Taraneh Alidoosti and Babak Karimi. Opens Feb. 3 at Edwards Westpark 8, Irvine.

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