Recensioni de* critic*

The quiet, simmering intensity of The Salesman doesn't match the full boil of A Separation or About Elly. It's more about personal humiliation, the kind that flourishes with insecurity and develops into emotional rotgut. Farhadi ultimately sees the character's turmoil as a byproduct of Iran's consistently destructive social policies, the effects of which are constantly seeping up through the floorboards.

In a series of tautly constructed dramas that imbue the everyday struggles of married life with suspense and tragedy, filmmaker Asghar Farhadi has proven himself a remarkable observer of the social, moral, and personal dimensions that shape contemporary Iranian society. His latest film, The Salesman, explores these themes through the story of two actors (played beautifully by Taraneh Alidoosti and Shahab Hosseini) whose marriage is thrown into crisis when Rana is assaulted in their apartment.

The thematic integration of scenes from Death of a Salesman into the breakdown of Emad and Rana's marriage don't always fit together comfortably, save for perhaps the final scene between the pair, echoing Linda Loman's ironic final refrain ("We're free and clear, Willy….we're free…we're free…"). And the resolution of Emad's revenge-fueled search for his wife's attacker, while purposefully dissatisfying, does not do so in a way that is particularly interesting or thought-provoking.

Farhadi's profound interest in people manifests itself with a generosity of spirit that signals a contemporary humanist cinema all its own. The Salesman's narrative intrigues and subtextual insights into Miller's canonical work are as fascinatingly thorny as any in Farhadi's earlier films, but the rotating faces of The Salesman may endure the longest.

When "A Separation" capped its global success by becoming the first Iranian film to win an Oscar, Farhadi effectively became an international director, a fact he implicitly acknowledged by making his next film, "The Past," in France. With "The Salesman," he returns not only to Iran but to some deeply Iranian themes, examining an atavistic tendency even in the most modern-seeming men and pitting that against the compassionate humanism at the core of both secular and religious thought in Iran.

The real star here is Farhadi, who remains peerless at orchestrating fearsomely complex moral dilemmas from what seem like innocuous circumstances and continues to grow as a low-key visual stylist... By his insanely high standards, The Salesman is a lesser work.. But it's hard to get too worked up about such lapses in the moment, because Farhadi painstakingly builds The Salesman to a pitch of intensity that becomes almost too distressing to watch. He's definitely not a dime a dozen.

What's missing this time out is the sense that the drama signifies in some larger way, like it did A Separation, with its unforgettable image of a wizened patriarch lying helplessly at the center of a spiraling vortex of class and gender warfare, or the excellent About Elly, a quietly sinister chamber piece that mashes up The Big Chill with L'Avventura en route to exposing warped bourgeois pathologies. By comparison, The Salesman's social commentary comes off as rote and repetitive.

Asghar Farhadi's absorbing, Oscar-nominated seventh feature, The Salesman, opens on a theater set: neon marquees and living room furniture... As in his best film, A Separation, Farhadi's interest looks forensic but is really dramaturgical.

For all the nuance in Alidoosti's performance, the film's central partnership subsides into immobility. Apart from a few occasions (such as in the shared taxi, or the classroom), when he gives hints of a rounder character, Emad seems shaped only by suppressed male anger, and this becomes a trope rather than a trait, tiresomely reminiscent of the character he played in A Separation.

It is a mistake to dismiss Farhadi's narrative strategies as contrived, as some critics have. To do so underestimates the way his method generates close examination of the contradictions and subtleties of human behavior... What happens to his characters is as much a result of moral weakness as it is of accident and social conditions. Along with that, of course, is his unfailing talent for wresting moving, fine-tuned performances from his actors.

Farhadi, whose About Elly and A Separation are two of the greatest movies of the past decade, can find tension in the most mundane of exchanges, and he can bring your heart to a stop with just a few glances. But he also brings a sociological rigor to his work: Class, gender, property and the law are often at the root of his films. The Salesman works well on a ground level, but everything resting atop the foundational drama slowly crumbles.

In a routine thriller, the stranger who peeks in on Rana would be outed as a person of magnificent evil, perhaps embodying the couple's financial anxieties over having to unexpectedly procure a new residence. But such comfortingly exotic malevolence doesn't exist in Farhadi's world, as his villains are revealed to be variations of ourselves, reflecting our own desperation back to us in moralistic extremis.