Why The Salesman deserved its Best Foreign Film award

Asghar Fahradi's 2106 film, The Salesman, is completely deserving of its Best Foreign Film Oscar - a highly literate and well acted film start to finish, the kind that we see more and more coming from Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, Iran, and South Korea - and less and less from the U.S., sad to say. In brief, the film is about an 30-something couple in Tehran (I think); the man teaches literature in an all-male high school (the students are delightfully inquisitive and rambunctious; the classroom scene near the top of the film is a delight) and both husband and wife are actors by night, in a lead roles in a translated version for A Miller's Death of a Salesman. Over time, we see how the plot of this movie reflects on the plight of the characters in the play - but Farhadi is subtle about the point, with the strands not coming together till the last scenes. The essence of the plot is that the teacher's wife and co-star is assaulted by an intruder in their new, somewhat sketchy apartment and the man's search for the perpetrator, which leads him, and the film itself, in some completely unexpected directions. Ultimately, he becomes a man in crisis, torn by different forces - anger, fear, protectiveness, masculine pride - to make a moral and ethical decision. The pace of the movie is steady and unrelenting, keeping us thinking and engaged at every moment; we also get a rare view into cultural life in contemporary Iran - who would think that actors are performing Arthur Miller plays of all things? Fahradi hints at the heavy hand of the government - the actors have to wait for approval before staging the play, and they're concerned that some scenes or passages may be cut  but he doesn't belabor the point; people seem free to live their own lives of quiet desperation, just as in any Western city (save for the required head-dresses and all-concealing robes for the women - which of course gives the assault, which takes place in a bathroom shower, more poignancy and emotional weight for both wife and husband). The film is worth seeing both as a cultural document and as a highly intelligent and cinematic drama.