In the first-rate Iranian film, The Salesman (2016), by Asghar Farhadi, Emad, the main character, is not a salesman.  He is a schoolteacher who plays a salesman—Willy Loman—in a local production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, but this is not the only role he is drawn to assume.  A second role is that of vengeful husband after he discovers the man who mistook Emad’s wife Rana for a prostitute and may have impulsively abused her.  Although he’s a smart man who surely knows how to leave well enough alone, Emad, failing to do this, acts the dishonored avenger; and it ends badly.

Human weakness and fault are all over this downer of a film, but as well people are trying to adjust to, and stay alive in, urban society in general and Iranian society in particular.  The old apartment building where Emad and Rana live begins to collapse due to nearby construction work.  The former apartment of a prostitute, the couple’s new home, invites some aggression.  That the police are never called to investigate the situation has something to do with the fact that, as Anthony Lane puts it, “The woman [in Iran] is the guilty party until proven innocent.”

Life in The Salesman has people limping along day after day, and even those who charge ahead, as Emad does, are limping.  What Farhadi’s men believe themselves justified in doing—and they do gain our sympathy—suddenly pushes them and their wives against the wall.  Both sexes demonstrate their vulnerability, in a marriage, alas, which may be in jeopardy.  Is there a new role to take on that will salvage this?

(In Farsi with English subtitles)

Filmmaker Rama Burshtein is able to make believable the peculiar, unlikely actions of her chief character, Michal (Noa Koler), in the fascinating, not-very-comic The Wedding Plan (2017).  Michal deeply yearns to be married that she might be “normal” and “respected” and, oh yes, loved; but she pleases almost no one and is even jilted by her fiancé.  An Orthodox Jew, she starts maintaining that God will bless her with a new groom, to replace the man who jilted her, 22 days hence on the eighth day of Hanukkah.  She proceeds to hunt for the unknown groom.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     A better examination of long-lasting deprivation for an unmarried soul could not be imagined.  Burshtein and actress Koler render Michal a nice but weary woman, frowning with confusion, nervously hopeful, struggling for faith.  Koler’s acting is incisive, great.  The Wedding Plan, though rather thin, is meaningful un-arty art.  Michal reminds me a little of Lily Bart in Wharton’s The House of Mirth except that she isn’t a tragic heroine, which is certifiably appropriate.

(In Hebrew with English subtitles)

Cover of Army of Shadows – Criterion Collection

Jean-Pierre Melville‘s Army of Shadows (1969), adapted from a Joseph Kessel novel, would be a mere adventure story if it were not for its impressive sophistication and excellent execution.  It follows the actions of Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) and other French Resistance members in German-occupied Marseille.

The Nazis in the film are scumbags, suspicious and inhumane.  The qualms about violence the resisters often exhibit never arise in the hearts of the Germans.  But the resisters do kill, for various reasons; yet, alas, the Nazis are able to shockingly push them against the wall.  Watch the entire movie and you’ll see what I mean.

Treated unfairly in France—for one thing, it was thought the Resistance ought not to be glorified after the Algerian conflict—Shadows is long and slow-moving but, to me, fascinating and effectual.

(In French with English subtitles)

In William Wellman‘s Night Nurse (1931), the world of nursing can be an alarming and even dangerous one because of human nature.

Barbara Stanwyck stars as Lora Hart, a nurse hired to care for an alcoholic’s two ostensibly sick children.  In truth, a lawless brute called Nick (Clark Gable) is slowly starving the children because their deaths will mean financial gain for him.  It is the early Thirties, and the big city is producing small-time Al Capones and Johnny Torrios.  A bootlegger (Ben Lyon) who is sexually attracted to Lora represents moral ambiguity.  He is an inhumane man, but he helps Lora against Nick.  All of this, and the fact that Lora seems to be taking up with the bootlegger, requires that she be a strong woman, in the way that her somewhat cynical friend (Joan Blondell) is strong.  And she is.

Based on a novel by Grace Perkins, Night Nurse is blunt and engrossing, more consequential than Wellman’s The Public Enemy.  Even David Thomson, who has been unfair to Wellman, has praised it.