Fear, anxiety, shame, disconnectedness, and trauma. Asghar Farhadi in his Oscar-winning movie The Salesman(2016) presents the viewer a condition of modern human beings who have to cope with their inner struggles while bowing to traditional expectations.
Rana and Emad are theater performers producing “Death of a Salesman” by Arthur Miller. They seem to have stable mind conditions until an unexpected intruder invades their peace with a trauma he creates in Rana. This mysterious assaulter creates cracks in the couple’s relationship as well as their psychological state of mind.
While Rana tries to overcome her trauma by forgiving her assaulter, Emad takes the situation to a whole new level. There are two sides to the event as the story unfolds: societal and psychological. First of all, the characters approach the event by trying to cover up its reality from their social sphere. They do not feel comfortable about a sexual assault story being known by their friends. Rana does not even go to the police because the neighbors convince her of its uselessness and the uncomfortable situation she will have to go through while explaining the incident.
These factors push Rana and Emad to invest their energy in different directions while trying to cope with the psychological side of the incident. Rana is terrified of being alone and tries failingly to act out her role in the play. Her stubbornness only makes her suffer more. Emad, with the same stubbornness, takes the matter into his own hands and secretly tries to find the assaulter. However, at the end of the day, both characters fail to cope with their distress. They disconnect from each other. Rana barely talks to Emad and he seems too worried about finding the intruder rather than his wife’s traumatic condition. While he should be helping his wife overcome the trauma, he gets too seeped into figuring out who her attacker is. He spends sleepless nights thinking about the assaulter and investigating the clues he left behind. This turns Emad into an unendurable partner. He seems emotionless and uncaring about what his wife has to say. He is so focused on the final target that he transforms into the guilty character at the end of the movie.
Each scene in the movie achieves keeping the suspense alive emotionally and psychologically. The characters aim at different goals while gradually disconnecting from each other and deteriorate psychologically. Their different approaches to the events clash and cause conflicts in the movie creating a perfect portrayal of the human condition when confronted with a trauma.
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