Following his international, Oscar-winning break-out A Separation, thankfully we’ve had a chance to catch up on the films of Asghar Farhadi. After About Elly and Fireworks Wednesday recently got proper U.S. releases in the past two years, it’s abundantly clear that the Iranian director is one of the most humanist working today. His latest, The Salesman, premiered at Cannes where it picked up Best Actor (Shahab Hosseini) and Best Screenplay, and now the first U.S. trailer has arrived today from Cohen Media Group and Amazon Studios.
While I liked it a great deal more than our review states, thanks to the film’s ability to generate considerable empathy for its antagonist, we said back at Cannes, “Excessively schematic plotting is a recurring weakness of writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s work. Films like About Elly and The Past suffered from contrived narratives, though the emotions they were able to generate – in the characters, as well as the viewer – were powerful enough that they largely compensated for the overdetermined nature of the films’ trajectories. This isn’t the case with the The Salesman, sadly. Uncharacteristically inert, the film plods its way to a strained finale that erodes much of the strength of its potentially compelling themes.”
Check out the new trailer below.
After their old flat becomes damaged, Emad (Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti), a young couple living in Tehran, are forced to move into a new apartment. However, once relocated, a sudden eruption of violence linked to the previous tenant of their new home dramatically changes the couple’s life, creating a simmering tension between husband and wife. A master at exposing domestic discord through his multi-layered screenplays, Farhadi’s slow-burning, visceral drama explores the psychology of vengeance and a relationship put under strain while continuing to explore the condition of women in Iran and the male psyche.
The Salesman opens on January 27th, 2017.