The 2017 best foreign language Oscar went to this staggering indictment of physical slight & the enveloping revenge which consumes an Iranian couple. A theatrical adaptation of Death of a Salesman is being put on by an Iranian acting troupe when a married couple, involved in the affair, need to move to a new apartment. Once in their new place an incident occurs, due to confusion on the attacker's part sending the husband on a trail of disappointment, resentment & impotence to regain face & bring honor back to his family.

This realistic movie is one of the best films that show the truth of Iran society.

"The Salesman" is a pre-bad (worse than bad) movie; a nugatory one. It neither sells anything nor buy. It is unable to sell and buy and incapable of dealing or discussing at all.It's a not-yet-made, confused and passive movie to which the action happens- from the outside-. It doesn't have any sort of action of its own, let alone character. It's a movie with no story, script, directing, camera-work, or editing.The movie doesn't even have an acceptable "what" due to a hollow script to which anything enters and from which anything exits. The script lacks many necessary things but contains lots of useless ones, instead. Of course, nothing has been aesthetically removed from the script, for nothing is there in the first place. Thus the writer doesn't have anything at all to remove.The movie is incomplete, unfinished and "open". The director doesn't know that an "open" phenomenon is not a phenomenon yet. It can be open only after it is able to be closed and after it is completely finished.Our director, as if he knows that his "The Salesman" needs a lot of effort yet to be a movie, attends lots of interviews and attaches himself to his dumb movie. He pretends to be oppressed, spark controversy about himself, and soothe himself by making a "modern" pretension to be intellectual and relativist. Thus, he pleases himself for "causing the audience to have a mental challenge" and "that the audience is full of questions while coming out of the theatre is of worth" for him.One should remind him that it is not worthy at all if the audience come out of the theatre being confused by lots of unanswered questions. It is not worthy at all if all of those questions are about the "what" of the story but not "how" it is told. it is not worthy at all if the origin of the questions is the audience not facing a specific and finished story by which he can reach the "how" and experience.He (the director) has left us no other choice but to remind him that cinema is neither a horn nor a riddle. A work of art is a live experience, not a proposition or the answer to several questions. Art is not a statement, but the way of stating. The audience's challenge with a good work of art is intuitive and emotional, then intellectual. The intellectual who doesn't have the slightest idea of feelings, is one of the concept-oriented people who can never understand art.The audience's main question about this vague and passive movie is the following: "Is someone raped or just attacked?" In order to pretend that the movie is important, the director decisively says, in one of the interviews, that "no one is raped." Nevertheless, the movie implies the opposite. Not in its mise en scene- which isn't actually there-, but by two dialogues; one is of the wretched violator's ("I was tempted.") and the other one is of the doleful victim's ("I wish I were dead."). In another interview, with a Hitchcock sense of humor- which doesn't fit him at all- the director mentions that he hasn't been in the bathroom, so he doesn't know what has happened.

Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi delivers another slow-burn domestic drama in this movie about patriarchal insecurity and helplessness.The film isn't as gripping as "A Separation," but it's still a fascinating character study of a middle aged actor whose wife is assaulted (the details of her assault remain vague, both to him and to the audience) and sets off on a grim mission to seek vengeance on the attacker in whatever way it presents itself. Juxtaposed to these scenes are ones showing him perform in an Iranian production of "Death of a Salesman," the ultimate male mid-life crisis story. Like watching a car accident in slow motion, we see him move closer and closer to his goal even as his wife wants him to quit and we gain some sympathy, however slight, for the attacker. As in "A Separation," Farhadi constructs a complicated set of characters with complicated emotions, not interested in good vs. bad or even right vs. wrong, suggesting instead that perhaps everything is to a greater or lesser degree a shade of gray. But the story he builds around these events isn't as compelling as "A Separation," so the film doesn't have that earlier one's dramatic punch.Winner of the 2016 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, though the excellent German film "Toni Erdmann" really should have won.Grade: A-