Escutcheon of Entities: A Structural Analysis of The Salesman movie by Asqar Farhadi

The Salesman, winning Academy Award for the best foreign film in 2016, attracted a large number of critics and viewers. The Salesman is Asghar Farhadi’s sombre new movie is the story of a shocking and mysterious event which shatters the wellbeing of a middle-class couple. It is about male pride, male violence, male privilege and the appearance of the middle social class– but since its first appearance at Cannes last year, the film has outgrown its own immediate significance. It became a totem for cultural resistance to Donald Trump when the proposed travel ban threatened to exclude this Iranian director from the Academy Awards, where The Salesman was nominated for best foreign language film. This paper tries to explore The Salesman, a movie incorporating all modern and postmodern techniques including Shakespearean drama, intertextuality and subtexts, play in play and mis-en-abyme qualities interwoven in the structure of it. The central question of present paper is what subtexts are fundamentally placed in this movie and for what purpose this movie bears any resemblance in its name with the masterpiece of ArthurMiller’s The Death of Salesman to discuss similarities and dissimilarities between them and used in this movie.

Keywords:

The Salesman , The Death of Salesman , mise en abyme , Asqar Farhadi , Arthur Miller , Intertextuality