The Salesman by Asghar Farhadi Analysis

The Salesman

Directed by: Asghar Farhadi

Year: 2016

Language: Persian

Awards: Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Best Actor and Best Screenplay at Cannes Film Festival.

This is a film that believes that life is not black or white. It's sheer brilliance what Asghar Farhadi does, he makes the audience sympathize with the person who assaulted a woman. It gives a perspective from both sides, it comes from a voice that no matter how right you're, sometimes you need not show your righteousness. In today's world, where everything is labeled as right or wrong films like this give the audience a different perspective to look at things. What he does similar to A Separation is, he gives us a situation and with every detail that gets added in the situation he plays with the audience's senses of right and wrong. He gives the audience a crystal clear picture of everything and lets them decide for themselves. In this film, it's even more complicated than that. The audience have a certain sense of who's right and who's wrong by two-thirds of the film and after that the kind of punishment or repurcussions they face will again make them wonder if the punishment is needed or not. On paper, things are guilty or not guilty. But in real life and in Asghar Farhadi's films, things are a lot more complicated.

The craft of his films are unique, especially the editing in his films by Hayadeh Safiyari. The editing is done in such a way that it never calls for attention, even in the scene where the premise of the film is established. It feels heartless, that this scene is being treated similarly to every other scene but that's only the physicality of it. Farhadi knows that internally, this scene is building up a lot of tension. The scene-to-scene transitions are some of the best ones I've ever seen. It's a weird thing to observe, the editing but since I'm editing my short film, I end up observing a lot of cuts in the film and I can't help but wonder how she gets every cut, perfect to the frame. I'm sure she must be having a set of rules, which she uses to cut these scenes. There's no single technique that is used throughout the film, but every scene transition is done so effortlessly that you can't even keep track if a scene has completed and another scene has started. 

Shadab Hosseini won the Best Actor at Cannes Film Festival for this film, it was interesting to see him play a different role than from the role in A Separation. The best thing about his performance is, he doesn't try to make the character different from what he did in A Separation. It isn't like this character is precisely the opposite of what we see in that film, this character too has some shades of it and yet it is established that this guy is different from that guy. Usually, actors play roles in different genres, in different settings, in different physical worlds of films to show diversity in their filmography but Hosseini does that with just his nuanced performance.