Rana's emotional collapse and Emad's obsessions have an impact on the play, which is itself an examination of the last gasps of male power. Rana suffers from a traumatic event, the details of which seem murky at best, and Emad makes it his cause to find the perpetrator to exact some type of revenge against him. It's a masterful moment and one in which I felt Farhadi took a giant leap forward in visual, suspenseful storytelling. She leaves the front door open as she heads to the bathroom, the camera lingering on that door for too many beats for anything good to come of it. One evening, Rana prepares to take a shower and buzzes her intercom to presumably let her husband into the building. Although the prior tenant never appears in the film, her existence and perceived morality linger over everything that transpires. Once safely out of the apartment, the couple move into the temporary digs of a woman who has yet to clear out one room, leaving behind personal belongings and a reputation as a prostitute.
Both have taken on the lead roles in the Miller play, with Emad doing double duty as beloved school teacher. It's an apt analogy of the cracks soon to come in their marriage. When the film opens, a married couple, Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) must evacuate their apartment as the walls crumble due to nearby construction gone awry. With each successive film, Farhadi's work has felt less stage bound, more cinematic, which is ironic considering the new film uses a production of Arthur Miller's DEATH OF A SALESMAN as its backdrop. His latest won the Best Actor and Screenplay awards at the Cannes Film Festival and today scored a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nod. The former playwright won an Oscar for A SEPARATION and followed it up with THE PAST, starring Berenice Bejo of THE ARTIST. THE WHITE BALLOON and BASHU THE LITTLE STRANGER come to mind, but such is not the case with writer/director Asghar Farhadi, whose films about adults play out like silent screams in the face of the patriarchy and governmental bureaucracy. Iranian filmmakers have long disguised their political dissent by way of children's parables in order to skirt their nation's stringent censorship board. IT'S MILLER TIME - My Review of THE SALESMAN (3 1/2 Stars)
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