The Salesman (2016)

Acting:                  10

Score(music):          6

Cinematography:   8

Dialogue:               10

Rewatchable:        Yes

A man, a teacher and part-time actor, moves with his wife, also an actress, to a new apartment. One day, he comes home to find his wife assaulted, and then begins a search for the culprit while she struggles to deal with the trauma.

Simple story right?

Wrong.

The Salesman is one of those you are just glad you watched when its over. The movie is laden with themes of forgiveness, revenge and humiliation, but despite all this, it manages to stay clear from being preach-y or too pedantic.

Asghar Farhadi, who directed and wrote the script, did a great a job of just telling a story and leaving all the interpretation for the viewer (At least that's how I see it). The writing was just brilliant. In the movie, the man (Emad) and his wife (Rana) are both stage actors doing a production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Asghar did a great job with finding parallels between the play and his movie and interweaving the narrative.

A clutch of great acting all-round, Taraneh Alidoosti (as Rana) stood out for me. I felt she executed her mostly traumatized character well. Shahab Hosseini was great also. His gradual descent from loving, caring teacher into someone driven only by blind revenge is laudable. In fact, he won the Cannes Award for Best Actor for this role.

The Salesman won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film (Its an Iranian film), among numerous other awards. Rightly deserved too. However, Asghar Farhadi, an Iranian, boycotted the Oscars in protest of Trump's travel ban.