The Salesman

The new movie by the extraordinary Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi is nominated for a Foreign Film Oscar and won the Best Screenplay and Best Actor prizes at Cannes.
Farhadi's movies are about middle-class Iranians and how they go about navigating their lives in a country that seems to be stifled by state-imposed traditional values. In A Separation, a couples' divorce drama unleashes a ripple effect that seems to destabilize everyone around them.
In the masterful About Elly, a woman tells a little white lie that leads to tragedy. In The Salesman, something more violent is at work, but Farhadi's preoccupation is the same: how an oppressed society handles the pressure. Somehow he manages to get past the censors; except for a judge in A Separation, he never shows the authorities. He doesn't need to. He shows what happens when people have to live by their rules. People exercise self-censorship, talk in euphemisms, lie and omit things constantly. It's the only way to steer clear of absolute judgment.
Farhadi is a great writer of suspense, but his movies are not about criminals and detectives. They are about family and society. Going into his stories is like unraveling a thread in a very complicated maze. We become detectives. Like the characters, we find out things because of telling details, off-hand remarks, neighbors' gossip. That's because anyone rarely says anything directly.
Emad (Shahab Hosseini, excellent) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti, who should have won Best Actress), are married actors who are starring in a modest production of Arthur Miller's "Death of A Salesman". That is, they are sophisticated and cultured. One day, Rana is attacked in her own home. She refuses to go to the police. In this, she may be no different from any victim of sexual assault in this country who fears that she will be treated like the instigator. But the sense of shame pervades everything and everyone. Even her own husband, who is a beloved teacher and who loves her, lords patriarchally over her, is so ashamed himself, that he can't even bear to ask her directly, as she can't bear to answer. The words "rape", or "assault", are never uttered. The fact that she left her door open -- an innocent, terrible mistake, can be misconstrued not only by the police and the courts but by family and friends as some sort of personal depravity on her part. So Emad takes things into his own hands and for the most part of the movie we watch as this couple cannot bring themselves to confront what happened head on. He's full of controlled rage, she is traumatized, and their inability to come together in truth threatens to dissolve their marriage.
Farhadi posits that in such a culture everything is a mystery, and since people go to great lengths to avoid the law (not because they did something wrong but because they fear its intransigence) they get into terrible moral dilemmas. They are on their own. What the state seems to demand from citizens, unattainable personal virtue, becomes a show, an intricate performance rife with euphemistic codes of conduct that people must interpret constantly. And we're talking about perfectly decent people. In order to appear virtuous, mainstream citizens have to lie. Because human relationships are messy and human beings are fallible, everyone is somehow suspect.
The opening scene takes place in an apartment building that is being evacuated. It is on the brink of collapse. Are we at war? Has there been an earthquake? Farhadi pans almost demurely to a bulldozer next door, ripping the earth out from under the escaping citizens. If that is not a concentrated metaphor for man-made hubris, I don't know what is.
Then for the next two hours, as Emad and Rana find a new apartment through the benefaction of an actor friend (beware of people who volunteer favors), we are immersed in a moral whodunnit of which the revelation is a complete shocker.  Once we get past the shock, there is more in store for us; two or three astounding moral twists that make us question our own capacity for judgment, mercy and retribution. They are truly shocking, for they are truly human.

About Elly

Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi is one of the most accomplished filmmakers in the world today. You may have seen his best-known movie, A Separation, which was nominated for Best Screenplay and Best Foreign Film Academy Awards in 2012. About Elly is from 2009, but only now comes to the US.
As in A Separation, the complexity of human behavior is multilayered and staggering. Farhadi makes movies about family issues, but he builds them like thrillers. I do not want to give too much away, because this movie unspools like a mystery and the revelations will keep you on the edge of your seat. Yet, it is almost impossible to write about his films without grappling with his elaborate plots. Anything you say, you already said too much. I can't think of any other writer-director who crams so much irony, so much character and such intricate plots in movies about personal issues like marriage, divorce and family. An individual makes a choice that may slightly deviate from the norm, and the ramifications are infinite.
You would think that we are talking about a thriller where something goes horribly wrong for either criminal or mysterious reasons. But About Elly is about good intentions that become a nightmare. A weekend camping trip turns to horror because the almost innocent, well-intentioned choices of individuals are antithetical to absolute, and absolutely enforced, values in Iranian society. The two main female characters have to resort to subterfuge because in such a society women are not expected to make all of their own choices. Farhadi's films are about the tension between individual freedom and the pull of family and society. In a place like Iran, this tension can be unbearable.
Farhadi introduces us to a trio of nice young couples going on a weekend holiday. Sepideh has invited Elly, her daughter's teacher, to join them. She wants to introduce her to Ahmed, who recently divorced his German wife. He seems like a great catch, and so does she. The first act is a leisurely romp through the warmth of family and friendship. We don't know exactly how these people are related. We find out who is married to whom during the course of the movie. All we know is that Elly is the only one who is uncomfortable, even if they are sweet to her. Imagine the stress induced by a weekend-long blind date surrounded by a group of people you don't know. Poor girl.
Elly wants to return to Teheran, but Sepideh insists she must stay. Only as the truth unfolds later do we learn the real reasons for Elly's discomfort and her almost rude insistence to leave. A mother asks another woman to keep an eye on the kids at the beach. She leaves that responsibility to Elly, the one person who doesn't want to be there. A long, breathtaking sequence of the rescue of a boy drowning in the ocean is panicked, chaotic, urgent, and as real as the air we breathe. Then Elly is nowhere to be found. The reasons can be many; Farhadi loves to leave mysteries unexplained. I question the honesty of such a degree of audience manipulation, in which the director chooses not to show us everything that is happening while we struggle to figure it out. But what really matters to Farhadi is the relationship between the characters and the social rules they must abide by. My favorite scene, and a testament to Farhadi's enormous capacity for empathy, is Sepideh opening her eyes to a terrible waking nightmare, one of which she is in part guilty, tragically, for all the best reasons.

The Past

There are no answers. Or there are no easy answers in this amazing film from Asghar Farhadi, the writer/director of A Separation.  This is how a drama is made.
Ahmad, an ex-husband (Ali Mossafa) comes back to Paris from Teheran to officially divorce his wife Marie (Berenice Bejo, from The Artist), who now wants to marry Samir, a new man (Tahar Rahim, from A Prophet). Sounds simple enough, but Farhadi lets this tale unravel with the endless complications of life: lies, secrets, motives, fears.
Families are not the single, solid, unshakable unit they used to be. Now they are comprised of stepfathers and stepmothers and parents who move away and have their own families. The kids are bounced around the needs of the adults. The adults in this case are all caring, competent people, they are all dealing with other people's children as if they were their own. Farhadi is a keen observer of the heaviness of little things. When people have complicated pasts (and Marie's is above average) a little incident, like kids misbehaving, for instance, unleashes ripples of spoken and unspoken consequences. Everything is a clue: she did not reserve a hotel room for Ahmad. He still keeps all his stuff in her house. Why? Her sullen teenage daughter hates Samir. Ahmad functions almost like the town crier, spilling confidences left and right. But what is his motive?
We think we know the answers, and we do, superficially, but like the characters in this movie, we really don't know the half of it. The Past is a detective story of love.
In lesser, more sentimental hands, it would be a barely credible weepie, a convoluted soap opera, but Farhadi is too smart and sensitive for melodrama; he is interested in motive and in the mysteries of human behavior. Why people do what they do (for one overwhelming reason: love) and the mostly unhappy consequences this brings.
Ahmad starts finding out what has been happening since he was gone. Turns out, each character has a past, and they all intertwine, connected by a single thread of love and need and family. The characters become detectives in their own story because they need to try to understand the tangled roots of their present predicament in order to move on to a future that seems extremely fragile.
The movie is full of telling detail. As in A Separation, Farhadi turns a personal family drama almost into a thriller, creating a richly woven and masterfully crafted story. As a writer, he manages to create such a rich structure that the second half of the movie, in many instances where movies tend to sag, becomes a tight knot of deeper and stranger revelations. The camera work is brilliantly unobtrusive, there is no music, no need to call out easy sentiments, in a movie where nothing that is happening is easy. We are intimate witnesses to a series of family crises and are positioned so close to the characters that we eavesdrop on this tangled web of conflicting desires. It is an intense and bracing experience. Normal life is very hard, and what we witness is the stubborn resilience of those who want to make it worth living, with all its heavy baggage.