The film opens showing us a marriage bed-a startling image in an Iranian film. Like all but the first two of his features, “The Salesman” tackles what has become his signature subject: middle-class marriage. Fassbinder, he uses the language of theatrical melodrama to probe social and psychological fissures. That makes sense, because he’s not an experimenter like Rivette. I recently asked Farhadi if he was familiar with theater-themed Jacques Rivette films such as “L’Amour Fou” and “Out 1,” and he said he wasn’t. The meaning and importance of that move are worthy subjects for discussion, because in no sense does the film seem to be about theater. “The Salesman,” though, marks the first time he’s ever taken us into the theater. While other Iranian directors seem to reflect the influence of the Italian neorealists and other Europeans, Farhadi freely admits his admiration for films like Elia Kazan’s “ A Streetcar Named Desire,” with its fusion of cinema and the stage. Studying the literature of theater-he did his dissertation on Pinter’s use of silence-he has said, taught him to write, and that skill has been integral to his career as a filmmaker. Arriving in Tehran hoping to study cinema in college, he was instead assigned to the theater school, an apparent misfortune that he has called one of the luckiest things that ever happened to him. Next to Beyzaie, Farhadi is the prominent Iranian filmmaker most associated with theater. When a friend asked if it was realistic that Asghar Farhadi’s new, Oscar-nominated “The Salesman” shows an Iranian company staging Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”-a play by an American Jew-I replied that such things are common, as are presentations of works by Americans such as Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and Sam Shepard. While Iran, uniquely in its region, has not only an indigenous form of traditional theater (Ta’ziyeh) but also a strong modernist descendant that includes such monumental talents as writer-director (and filmmaker) Bahram Beyzaie, Tehran also sees frequent stagings of works by playwrights including Ionesco, Beckett and Pinter. Theater is also a lively center of cultural action.
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