The Salesman

Emad and Rana are performing in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman in Tehran when their apartment building begins to collapse. In their new flat — previously occupied by a woman the neighbors speak about in low voices — someone enters one night while Rana is alone. What the film is really about is how one man's damaged sense of honour drives him toward something that will destroy more than it repairs. Farhadi uses Miller's play as a mirror: Willy Loman's delusions echo Emad's, and the tragedy is the same — a man protecting an image of himself that was never quite true.