THE SALESMAN: Another Asghar Farhadi film, another disturbing, moving thought-provoker

What? They produce plays by Arthur Miller in modern-day Iran? It would seem so (even if the censors may have to delete a few lines here and there); at least, that is what we discover via the new film from Oscar-winner Asghar Farhadi (of A Separation and a flock of even better films). In his newest work, THE SALESMAN, our very attractive and hot young couple are performing the leading roles of Willy and Linda in Death of a Salesman.

Mr. Farhardi, shown at right, is a continuing master at offering up present-day Iran via its bourgeoisie and making the lives shown and problems explored look, to our eyes, remarkably like our own. Except in certain important cultural ways. (I was going to include the word "religious," but what we see seems so deeply ingrained as to have gone well past religion into the country's culture.) The husband here is also a school-teacher, and we see him (and how his mind works) in the classroom with his students, who seem to like and respect him.

One evening, post-performance, as the wife, home alone, is removing her stage make-up, the buzzer to the couple's apartment building rings. Expecting her husband, she buzzes him in, leaves their apartment door ajar and goes back to the bathroom. This will change their life.

From this point on, the movie, which has begun almost as a kind of critique of life in Iran, opens up into so much more. In the opening scene, the couple's original apartment building must be evacuated, as it appears to be literally breaking apart. Much of the city, it seems, has been rather poorly constructed.

Yet from the "event" onwards, the movie becomes a deeper, unsettling exploration of trust and betrayal, love, respect and, as seems true of all of Farhadi's films, a critique of his country's patriarchal/macho grounding, coupled to a look at slowly budding feminism.

The two leads are, as always in Farhadi's films, first-rate, with Shahab Hosseini (above, whom you might recognize as the nutcase hubby from A Separation) again doing a fine job as a man who slowly unravels in the course of events, and Taraneh Alidoosti (below, who played the title character in About Elly) doing an equally fine job as the wife who is "done wrong" not only by the event in question but by what happens afterward.

Farhadi's movie is part mystery, as solved by amateurs (who, for understandable cultural reasons, do not want to involve the police), and the filmmaker's handling of the sleuthing is expert: smart but not too smart, and very believable. Farhadi also, as is his wont, refuses to disclose all that has happened. But unlike some of what was withheld from us in A Separation, this adds to the situation's complexity, rather than seeming to be merely deliberate withholding on the filmmaker's part.

The result of all this quietly explodes into something much larger and more difficult that we (or this couple) could have expected. There is plenty of guilt to go around, along with a try for redemption. But the thirst for compensation/revenge is present, too. How the filmmaker weaves all this together makes for a spectacularly dense and slowly revealing conclusion that will have you feeling and understanding the viewpoint of every character present.

This is major filmmaking, and if Farhadi were to walk away with another Oscar, I would not be surprised. (His film is among the five nominees in the BFLF category). The Salesman forces you to re-consider your priorities: what you would finally allow or not allow, and how much damage you might be willing to inflict on another in order to satisfy your own sense of justice and/or need for revenge.

From Amazon Studios and the Cohen Media Group, in Persian with English subtitles and running a long but never boring 125 minutes, the movie opens this Friday, January 27, in New York City at the Angelika Film Center and the Lincoln Plaza Cinema, and in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Royal. Here in South Florida, it opens February 10 at the Tower Theater, Miami; the Movies of Delray and Lake Worth, and at the Regal Shadowood and Living Room Theaters in Boca Raton. To see the many playdates all across the country, with cities and theaters listed, simply click here and scroll down.

Asghar Farhadi's FIREWORKS WEDNESDAY gets U.S. theatrical premiere at Film Forum

The more movies I see from Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi, the more impressed I am. This is true even though the films I've lately seen were made years before his Oscar-winning A Separation and his following film, The Past. Opening this week is a ten-year-old movie titled FIREWORKS WEDNESDAY, which is almost as fine a film as About Elly, from 2009, which opened here only last year and is, in TrustMovies' estimation, the pinnacle of Farhadi's work so far.

The Iranian filmmaker, shown at right, is the only one I know of who gives us Iran's bourgeoisie in all its troubling, fascinating, gee-they're-kinda-like-us entirety. It is difficult to view the first three of these films, in fact, without being stuck by how little fundamentalist religion appears to rule. The key word here is appears, of course, because, fundamentalist ideals do penetrate and control. And yet -- ah, the endearing/disconcerting predilection of human beings toward denial and hypocrisy -- Iranians do seem to circumvent fundamentalism when they need or want to.

This is why I suspect that Farhadi has mostly circumvented the censors. He manages with almost amazing consistency and honesty to show us Iranians living within their cultural and religious boundaries while at the same time struggling to rise above them.

Yet his characters never give voice to anything negative about their culture/religion. No -- they simply show us their specific situations and how they handle these. So we can watch them struggling to be human, while the censors can see them as moving outside their restricted lives and having to paying the price of unhappiness.

This is quite the tightrope walk, but Mr. Farhadi manages it beautifully, unlike his countryman Jafar Panahi, who is more vocal and open in his criticism -- and has paid for it by, so far as I know, still being under some weird form of house arrest. (Though he did manage to make the great film Taxi while in this "subdued" state, so maybe this sort of "somewhat-censorship" agrees with him by forcing him into the kind of alternating submission, insistence and pretzel twists that lead to humanitarian movie masterpieces.)

In any case, back to Fireworks Wednesday, the plot of which entwines a middle-aged couple's marital troubles (two photos above) with a young bride-to-be cleaning lady (seated, above, and at left, below) and the not-so-young woman (standing above, left) who lives across the hall. The movie takes place within a single day and night, during which we learn everything we need to know about these people to understand what they're going through and why. As usual, Farhadi identifies with all his major characters, and so, eventually, do we.

His film begins with a simply priceless scene (above) that works symbolically and realistically -- involving a chador and a motorcycle -- and manages, without raising its voice (or even suggesting this) to question tradition, fundamentalism, patriarchy, and a whole lot more. From there we bounce from one event to the next, as the movie becomes a surprisingly suspenseful tale of possible adultery, friendship and several instances of help and betrayal.

Before the film is finished, that chador has gotten up to all kinds of odd things, and our sympathies have been tossed back and forth among the various characters and their friends. By the end, the filmmaker has given us yet another amazing, in-depth tale of middle-class life in modern Iran.

A Grasshopper Film release and running 104 minutes, Fireworks Wednesday opens this Wednesday, March 16, at Film Forum in New York City, where it will have a two-week run. As for other playdates and cities, I am not sure, Perhaps the distributor -- a newcomer in the field of foreign, independent and documentary films -- will see fit to tell us soon.

"Rights," wrongs, and a welcome salvage: Asghar Farhadi's early gem, ABOUT ELLY

Those of us who do not travel to film festivals have been waiting to see ABOUT ELLY since 2009, when the film won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Thanks to issues of "rights," this movie has remained in "American limbo" since then. Written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, who went on to give us the Oscar-winning A Separation and then The Past, the film is at last being distributed by The Cinema Guild and hits the U.S. with its theatrical premiere this Wednesday, April 8, here at Film Forum in New York City, before arriving in another 16 cities across the country, beginning in May.

In addition to being, for this viewer at least, the best of Farhadi's three films that I've seen, About Elly also gives us further clues as to why this filmmaker, shown at right, is so able to work seemingly unmolested by censorship, house arrest and the like -- unlike, say, Jafar Panahi. Farhadi is one hell of a lot subtler than Panahi, as well as much more dramatically compelling in his stories.

The filmmaker shows us what look like middle-class (tending toward the upper) characters, who rarely if at all appear to be religious and who would -- except for their language and the headdress of the women -- be nearly indistinguishable from those of many European countries and, hell, even from us here in the USA. No wonder Farhadi's films are so popular with the cinematic elite of the western world.

Further, the concerns of these characters mirror so many of our own -- from the usual man/ women relations to child-rearing and -schooling to setting up one of their good friends with a possible "significant other." More important, where fundamentalism is concerned, whatever problems these people have can easily be attributed to their own faults and misdeeds, particularly those of the women on view -- something that would of course appeal to a fundamentalist/ patriarchal society like Iran (and OK, a few other countries, too.)

And yet I don't believe for a minute that Farhadi truly feels this way himself. Look at what happens in A Separation or About Elly (The Past is set in France and so wiggles out a bit from my theory), and you see people so constricted by their society and its mores that they have no genuine control of their lives -- except by towing the party line.

When something mysterious and possibly fatal happens in About Elly -- the sudden disappearance by the sea of one of the main characters, which will put movie buffs in mind of L'Avventura -- watch what occurs between a husband and his wife, the latter of whom turns out to know much more than he (or we) realized about Elly, and who has kept these facts from the rest of the group. What we get is sudden anger, then verbal and physical abuse. To us this may be shocking, but you just know it will please those religious censors.

About Elly seamlessly weaves its exposition into smart, believable dialog between these friends as they head out and arrive at their seaside week-end away. We learn tons of information about all of them, piecemeal, and over the long haul. What we learn about Elly makes us concerned and uneasy, though we won't understand why for quite some time.

How these people handle themselves, their friends, their children, smacks so thoroughly of the way we all do the same -- with affection and hypocrisy, lies both white and black, trying to balance self-interest with reputation. The big difference here is the society under which the characters must live. And that, to Farhadi's great credit, changes everything -- for everyone, including especially Elly.

Finally it seems, almost everything here is a lie, thanks to a culture based on them -- due of course to that exquisite combination of faith, religion and political power. If the shy school-teacher Elly at first seems to be the outsider, by the finale it is difficult  not to see every character as somehow "outside" the norm -- or would be, if the truth were to come out.

As a filmmaker, Farhadi balances visuals and dialog extremely well. He gives his cast all the room they need, and each comes across with a beautifully specific performance, while blending seamlessly into the ensemble. I am not going to list them all because each is as good as the next. And several cast members -- women and men -- are exquisitely beautiful, to boot. The filmmaker's final image, by the way, is a great one.

About Elly -- running almost exactly two hours, in Persian (with a bit of German) and translated with English subtitles -- opens this Wednesday, April 8th at New York City's Film Forum. You can see all currently scheduled playdates, with cities and theaters listed, by clicking here and scrolling down a bit.

Asghar Farhadi's THE PAST proves even better than his 2011 Oscar-winning A Separation....

What a fine filmmaker is Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian fellow who two years ago gave us the Best Foreign Film Oscar winner, A Separation, and is now back with an even better movie called THE PAST. For movie-goers who appreciate thoughtful, complex films about subjects eminently worth their time, you cannot do much better than Farhadi. This filmmaker's cool but intense style, choice of crackerjack actors, and -- most important of all -- ability to translate his ideas into fine, fierce dramas about how we live now results in films that resist melodrama at every turn and so remain utterly real and so believable that you are forced inside the mind and soul of each of their main characters.

That last and very great ability of Farhadi (shown at left) is what will make you hang on every word, every expression on his actors' faces, and as the story unfolds -- quietly but suspensefully, with a continual unfurling of events and motives, together with small but vital surprises that always make sense even as they enlarge your understanding what is going on -- you will have many of your preconceptions about these people, who they are and what they are doing, challenged.  I can't begin to tell you how rewarding the experience is.

The story begins as an estranged husband (Ali Mosaffa, above, right) and wife (Bérénice Bejo, below, right, and above, left) meet at the airport, he returning to Paris from Iran, where he was originally from, to sign a set of papers agreeing to a divorce so that she can marry the man she is now in love with. Soon we meet that man (Tahar Rahim, below, left), his young son (Elyes Aguis)...

...and the two daughters of the wife (from a marriage that predates both men), the older of whom (Pauline Burlet, below) is extremely fond of her step-father and is now estranged from her mom.

All these characters come to enormously full life, and we grow to care and hope for them, as well as understand the guilt that each of them experiences. "It is far too easy to simply say you're sorry," notes the father to his young son. And indeed, apologizing is something that is done often throughout the movie. The guilt here is plentiful, though not always as fully deserved as even the guilty might imagine, and as we explore why this is so, the movie simply becomes richer and deeper.

The acting is of a very high level in which each actor does what is called for without undue embellishment. The writer/director keeps a close hand on what he allows his actors to communicate, and us to see and hear, and so the experience becomes a particularly careful one, yet not at all circumscribed. The movie keep rolling outward, right up to and including its magnificent finale.

In fact, this is a better movie than the excellent A Separation because, this time, the filmmaker doesn’t unduly withhold vital information, yet his film still proves suspenseful and fascinating throughout. And there may be no one working today who manages the complexity of motives better than Farhadi.

I hope have said enough -- without giving away any of the surprises -- to send you out to view this extraordinary work, one of the year's best -- maybe the best -- film I have seen so far. The past, as so many of our writers have told us, never disappears. Yet there is a future. The negotiation of that road from the one to the other is what fascinates Farhadi and what he brings to such immediate, compelling life.

From Sony Pictures Classics,  The Past opens today, Friday, December 20, in New York City (at Film Forum and the Lincoln Plaza Cinema) and in Los Angeles (at Laemmle's Royal) and in the weeks to come will roll out across the country. Click here to see all currently scheduled playdates, with cities and theaters.

Asghar Farhadi's A SEPARATION: a shoo-in for the Best Foreign-Language Film shortlist

A SEPARATION, Iran's entry into this year's Best Foreign-Language Film sweepstakes, is, TrustMovies believes, almost certain to make the shortlist, as well as being among the final five films nominated, and -- he suspects, from what he's seen so far of the other entries -- very probably the winning film itself. It is that riveting a multi-generation family drama, utterly accessible to western sensibilities, and a film that will keep you on your toes right up until the last suspenseful moment. It is so good, in fact, that TM dearly wishes it were better. We'll get to why at the end of this post, where we will try our best to avoid spoilers.

Written and directed by Asghar Farhadi (shown at right, this is his fifth full-length movie as writer/director), the film appears at first to be about the dissolution of a marriage and family -- the separation of the title -- but soon evolves into much more. The mother, played well by Leila Hatami, shown below, wants the family (she, her husband and her daughter -- all clearly bright and well-educated) to move to the U.S.A. where she believes they will have a better life. (Perhaps she's unaware of our increasingly poor 99%, or maybe the family is richer than they seem.)

Her husband Nader (a terrific acting job, the movie's best, from Peyman Maadi, shown below, left) can't/won't leave his Alzheimers-ailing father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi, below, right, in his film debut), behind in Iran.

The couple's daughter -- a nice job of presenting teenage angst, in a quiet, eastern style over-layed with a religion biased against women, by Sarina Farhadi (below, and the director's own daughter) -- is angry, at first toward mom, and then later, for reasons that slowly become apparent due to the twists taken by the plot, toward her dad.

The catalyst for much of what happens is another mother/father/
daughter family that mirrors the first in interesting ways: They seem super-religious, as opposed to our three who are more secular, not particularly intelligent nor well-spoken -- and not nearly so well off.

The mother (Sareh Bayat, above, left, giving the strongest woman's performance in the film), her daughter in tow, takes a caretaker job with the first family, screwing things up in just about every way possible. When her mentally unbalanced, religious-nut husband (funny how these two qualities work together so well in this society) -- a riveting performance from Shahab Hosseini, below -- enters the picture, all hell threatens to break loose.

Questions of who knew what and when did they know it (doesn't that put you in mind of Watergate?) loom large as the film progresses, and it is when the pieces of the puzzle finally come together that my quibbles surface.

Our discovering the be-all-end-all event so late in the game is not a little annoying, particularly since we were literally right there, moments before that event happened. That the filmmaker chose to deprive us of this knowledge by cutting away at the singular moment smacks of manipulation rather than of organic storytelling. (This happens again right at the end of the film, when knowledge we might know and profit from is deliberately withheld from us.)

Yes, these characters -- all of them -- are flawed, and it is good that the filmmaker makes certain we understand this. But the loose ends here are awfully long and untidy (Is there a law in Iran that a doctor cannot testify as to the state of her patient at a certain day and time?  Was that missing money stolen, misplaced or what? And by whom?) Truth and justice may be murky, all right, but here it is simply made more murky by the filmmaker's choices.

All this does not sink A Separation, which is among the most western movies made by an easterner that I have seen (only Certified Copy beats it in terms of western sensibility). The performances are splendid, the dialog on target, the sense of place and space (below) captured beautifully. And the many moral questions the movie raises are well worth exploring. I recommend the film wholeheartedly -- despite these, yes, minor flaws -- because it is so full of intelligence, humanity and spirit. Word-of-mouth, I believe, is going to be major on this film, so don't be surprised if you can't get in to see it on your initial attempt or two.

A Separation (from Sony Pictures Classics, 123 minutes) opens this Friday, December 30, in New York (at Film Forum and the Lincoln Plaza Cinema) and in West Los Angeles at Laemmle's Royal. A nationwiderollout begins the following week and will continue over the coming weeks and months. Click here to see the playdates, cities and theaters so far scheduled.