Forušande‎ (Asghar Farhadi, 2016)

Farhadi's seventh feature bagged him the best foreign-language film Oscar, which the auteur then made optimal use of by publicly refusing to attend the awards ceremony as a protest against U.S. foreign policy. It speaks volumes of the man and his intelligence, just as his films do.
The Salesman continues along the same track that he's already carved out: a couple experience a moment of catharsis (here, a woman in Tehran is assaulted in their home while expecting her husband to return), where the viewer is denied crucial information, and then it is is up to us to piece together the truth, such as there may be any. It is detective work without a clearly delineated crime, but also a means of emphasising the subjectivity of experience, which in turn underlines how there are few cut-and-dried aspects to situations or people. Hence, the wife unhelpfully withholds what actually happened while the husband thunders on powered by the twin pressures of social stigmatisation and his own sense of self-righteousness. Neither is wrong or right: Farhadi's real craft is creating characters that are fully rounded, and he hasn't done it as well as this since A Separation.
A slow burner it may be, but that just means more time to think around the subject, from the fractured relationship between the couple to the values of the middle-class Iranian context and the parallels with the play Death of a Salesman, which they are starring in a production of, and all of these aspects are woven in with genuine purpose.

8/10