Editor's Note: If you "don't want to sleep" or "can't sleep," read on.
There may be a literary film here, and there may be a horror film here. I don't know if you'll fall asleep or if you'll be scared even more out of bed.
Tonight we will introduce a film about stage plays and reality.
There has always been no shortage of films in film history that use stage plays as mirror images to outline the similar fates of the protagonists.
Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar's "Say It to Her", one end at a time, is a clip of Pina Bausch's "Muller Café" and "Enthusiastic Mazurka", and the dancers on stage use either gloomy or bright body language to interpret the different emotions of the soft male protagonist.
His other masterpiece, "Everything About My Mother", Tennessee Williams' play "Desire StreetCar" runs through the film, connecting the origin and end of the heroine's pain.
A stage play in Almodóvar's films
"The Salesman," directed by Iranian director Asha Farhati and won this year's Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, is a rehearsal of Arthur Miller's 1949 death of the salesman.
In the film, Farhati "choreographed" the play about how the American dream devours small people, synthesizing the way the foreign predecessors used stage plays in "Say To Her" and "Everything About My Mother", taking the preparation work before the first and final performances of "Death of the Salesman", echoing the emotional state of the male and female protagonists Yin Mader and Rena from intimacy to alienation, and using the official performance of the play to profile the iranian moment, pointing out the inevitability of the emotional changes between the two.
Poster of "The Salesman"
The film begins with a show of the stage for the upcoming release of Death of a Salesman. The neon signs of the hotel built by scaffolding are far more eye-catching than the tables, chairs and beds in the home environment, explaining that willy, a salesman under the background of the rapid development of the US economy, has been walking on the road all year round, indicating that Iran is tearing everything down and rebuilding, and the middle-class families represented by the heroes and heroines, as the cornerstone of the formation of society, from the external shelter to the internal members, there are huge security risks. And the shaking inside is caused by the instability of the outside.
"The Death of a Salesman" on the "Salesman" stage
Immediately following the stage set, all the residents of the building where Yin Maide and his wife live, forced to get up from the bed in the middle of the night to escape, and the excavator that suddenly "visits" downstairs is shaking the foundation of the building. This scene reveals the current state of life of the Iranian people, just like the Willies of the Past in the United States, who were crushed by the wheels of the roaring train of the times.
The modern facilities in their homes and the Apple mobile phones in their hands show that Western material concepts have taken root in Iran, the intersection of Eastern and Western cultures, but Western-style civilization and order are prohibitive, and the lives of all the people in their homes and even a large number of people may be buried in the soil in an instant.
The house in "The Salesman" that could collapse at any time
The resulting knock-on effect, Rena bathed in a new place where the couple thought they had picked up a big bargain, and suffered violent attacks from strange men, but at the same time, like most married men in Iran, she was afraid that her wife's body was seen by the abuser and the male neighbor who rescued her, and gradually fell into emotional and moral difficulties.
Changes in the relationship between husband and wife in The Salesman
This operational dilemma, created by Iran's deep-seated traditional consciousness, is repeated in Farhati's films.
Focusing on juvenile delinquency and adult forgiveness, the father who lost his beloved daughter did not hesitate to ruin his family, vowing to pay the blood debt of the murderer who had just turned 18 in accordance with the law, but could not avoid the fact that his stepdaughter was physically disabled, and forgave that the murderer might get the cost of treating his unrelated daughter.
In Farhati's last film, "A Parting", which also won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the female nurse faced the toilet incontinence of Nader's elderly demented father, and did not know whether to reach out from the perspective of care, or to listen to the education received from a young age and not to touch the body of an adult man other than her husband.
Poster of "Beautiful City"
Poster of "A Parting Away"
In many of Farhati's previous films, the Quran, the highest classic of Islam, has guided the behavior of the characters, but the words and deeds of the characters have repeatedly broken the teachings of the classics out of consideration for their own interests.
Nader, who is already quite Westernized in the way of doing things in "A Parting", after working as a nurse, although he did not know that she was pregnant, did not dare to put his hand on the Quran and swear. But the husband of the nurse not only lied to the Quran himself in order to receive a considerable amount of compensation, but also asked his wife to disobey the will of the scriptures.
Images similar to those in "A Parting" in which the characters swear an oath to the Quran often appear in Farhati's films.
However, by the time the Salesman arrived, the Quran disappeared from the screen. Yin's confusion, which relies on paying for his purchases with credit cards, stems from Iranian blood rooted in his body, dragging his Western-style upbringing.
Like other middle-class people, Yomad is quite dissatisfied with today's Iran, but he is kind and upright, and he lives a positive and optimistic life. Seeing that the building was about to collapse, he slapped the door and called for Rena to get up while helping the vulnerable neighbors; he could not stop Rena from cleaning up the former tenant's belongings, and the rain in the middle of the night made him get up to find plastic sheets to cover the items; as a middle school teacher, he accepted all kinds of jokes from students in class, invited them to watch "The Death of the Salesman" starring him, and taught the students to think about the crisis of trust between people.
Rena's encounter activates the beast factor in Inmad's heart, allowing him to maintain his face as a traditional Iranian man through gratuitous catharsis. When the process of finding the abuser is frustrated, the students of the school and the colleagues of the troupe become the carriers of his hatred, and his attitude toward the former takes a one hundred and eighty degree turn, performing on the same stage with the latter, and even modifying Miller's lines without authorization, "borrowing the topic to play" insulting colleagues for the accommodation provided for him and his wife, which was originally the "reception house" of the wind and dust woman, and recruited her former "customers" to let them pick up small bargains and bad luck.
In "The Salesman", Yin Mader tampered with Miller's lines to vent his anger
More extremely, YinMaid gradually treats his wife coldly, tearing apart Rena's slowly healing psychological wounds again and again, while not being too big, hoping that the pain he has been inflicted by Iranian tradition can be returned to the perpetrator many times.
Yin Maid determined that the murderer was an elderly man with heart disease, ignoring his physical condition, asking him to tell the truth in front of his wife, daughter and son-in-law, Rena strongly discouraged, or even threatened that the relationship between the two might go to the end, Yin Maid was not moved, still using his fist to try to make an exit for his predicament, not forgetting to tell the old man the truth in disguise.
The murderer in The Salesman also has emotional and moral dilemmas
Iranian men's disregard for women's self-esteem, which is also one of the usual themes of Farhati's films, pushing them into an unbearable situation.
With the eyes of a girl who is about to enter the palace of marriage and lives by short-term work, "Fireworks Wednesday" that talks about the three women's marriage concepts of unmarried, married, and divorced stages, the wife is suspicious of the husband working at the TV station and the divorced hairdresser who is at home, and the husband swears that he can't stop her from following the pace, in exchange for her husband punching and kicking her on the street, but in fact, for a long time in the past, the husband did put the focus of his emotions on how to stay with the beautiful neighbors. He was violent toward his wife, but felt that his face was damaged.
Fireworks Wednesday poster
Farhati's other suspenseful "About Yili", more uses the whereabouts of Yili, a young and beautiful girl mixed into a group of friends who are mixed into a group of outing parties, to tell the hidden situation of women who are oppressed by their parents and marriage in contemporary Iran, and the women who brought Yili to the team became the bullseye of several highly educated and successful men when Yili's boyfriend appeared, the mystery accumulated more and more, and things were difficult to end.
Poster of "About Eli"
In addition, "The Salesman" is also like many of Farhati's films, in addition to telling the loss of the middle class and the asymmetry of the sexes, it is still integrated into the collision between this class and the common people, and completely draws a floating picture of Iranian society, in which the crisis is related to the open-ended end, which may become more and more intense, and does not rule out the turning of the crisis into safety.
Nader, who has dealt with the caregiver family in "A Parting", more or less understands that life is not all composed of dualistic elements, good and bad, but in a single thought, there is also more relief about the unknown choice of daughter to follow her father or mother.
The unmarried girl in "Fireworks Wednesday" smiles in the face of the lover who is crazy late at night, and the marriage that she has seen and heard in a day is difficult to form a revelation for her, she cannot solve the marriage problems of others, and the marriage road she wants to take can only be watched by others.
Back to The Salesman, assuming that the life of the elderly intruder was not destroyed by Yinmaid's revenge, could his relationship with his family be intact? The film does not account.
The expression on the face of the couple who played the couple in "The Salesman" when they finally put on makeup
The final shot is also left for remembrance, in the dressing room before the last performance of "The Death of a Salesman", Yin Made and Rena each have their own hearts to divide the stage makeup of Willy and his wife, and the two people who are "together" on the stage are interpreted, removing makeup and returning to the home without the audience, how to continue to run the marriage? Let the audience imagine.
At that time, Miller realized Willie's survival from career to marriage and family, and today's Farhati does not have such the courage to "face it head-on".