Bronze - The Salesman
Oscar Tidbit: The Salesman won Best Foreign Language Film at the 2017 Oscars. Other nominees were Toni Erdmann (Germany), Land of Mine (Denmark), A Man Called Ove (Sweden), and Tanna (Australia).
Director Asghar Farhadi did not attend the 2017 Oscars in protest of the U.S. travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries, including Iran. He chose to boycott the ceremony in solidarity with those affected, stating it was out of respect for people facing division and injustice.
Given the current political climate, it might seem risky to write about an Iranian film. However, in Asghar Farhadi Oscar-winning film, defies the constraints of censorship not through overt politics, but by shining a light on the everyday moral struggles of Iran’s middle class. His work is steeped in nuance—laced with literary references, most notably to Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the play around which the movie is structured. In his personal life, Farhadi has been outspoken, criticizing both the hardline elements of the Iranian regime and the hypocrisies of Western extremism. Yet The Salesman is not a political film in the traditional sense. Instead, it’s a study of masculinity, wounded pride, and the slow corrosion of intimacy.
The story begins with Emad and Rana, a married couple and actors in the aforementioned play, being jolted awake as their apartment building begins to collapse. Displaced, they quickly relocate to a new flat offered by a fellow cast member. It’s only later they learn the apartment’s former tenant was a sex worker, and soon after, Rana—home alone—suffers an offscreen assault after mistakenly buzzing in the wrong person.
Farhadi never shows the violence. Instead, he meticulously examines the aftermath. The trauma that follows isn’t just physical or emotional—it creeps into the silences between Emad and Rana, into the mundane routines they once shared, into the way they now occupy space together but no longer quite meet. What might initially be categorized as a slow-burning thriller gradually unravels into something deeper and more uncomfortable: a meditation on pride, justice, and the subtle ways violence can transform both the victim and those who love them.
As Emad begins his search for the assailant, we see his transformation—driven not only by love or concern, but by bruised ego and a need to reclaim control. His pursuit of justice begins to look more like a hunt for emotional restoration, and in doing so, he risks losing the very person he’s trying to defend.
When the villain, is found, he turns out to be frail, remorseful—far from the monster Emad imagined. And Emad himself is left teetering on the edge of cruelty, revealing just how thin the line is between righteousness and revenge. In the end, The Salesman is not a whodunit, but a what-now. It asks not who committed the crime, but what kind of people we become in its wake. In Farhadi’s world, no one escapes unscathed—not because of the violence itself, but because of how it exposes our deepest contradictions.
