Taraneh Alidoosti plays fear and refusal in the same still face, and the films around her keep giving that face less room than it earns. In The Salesman she is the reason the story matters, and the second hour is spent on somebody else.
Fi1m perspective
Watch what Taraneh Alidoosti does when the buzzer goes in The Salesman (2016). Rana Etesami has had something happen to her in the new flat, something she cannot bring herself to describe, and every time the door sounds she flinches, then covers the flinch, then sits very still so that her husband will not ask. She cannot stay in the flat alone and she cannot say why. Alidoosti plays all of this with almost no lines. It is a performance built out of what a woman does not say, in a film that spends its second hour on what her husband does about it.
She has been doing this since she was seventeen. Rasoul Sadrameli's I'm Taraneh, 15 (2002) put her first name in the title and made her a lead before she had finished at Amin Tarokh's acting school. Then came Asghar Farhadi, four times: Beautiful City (2004), Fireworks Wednesday (2006), About Elly (2009) and The Salesman. Farhadi's films are about decent, middle-class Tehranis finding out what they will do under pressure, and he kept coming back to Alidoosti to hold the quiet centre of the argument. She has never worked at volume. There was theatre, the series Shahrzad (2015–2018), and later Leila's Brothers (2022) and Subtraction (2022). It is a short list for a career that started so early, and it looks chosen.
The pairing with Shahab Hosseini, twice, shows how she works. Hosseini plays men who get louder as things go wrong; she plays women who get quieter. In The Salesman he is a decent teacher going sour and she is what he is going sour about. His is the showier part and the easier one to write. Farhadi's couples have a habit of freezing once the first shock has passed, and when the film freezes it is Alidoosti who is left holding the stillness. We found Rana's scenes alone in the flat harder to sit through than any of Emad's confrontations, because nothing was happening in them and she made us see precisely the thing that was not happening. Hers is the harder performance and the film gives it less room. That is our one complaint about her career, and it is not a complaint about her.
The Salesman is a good film, not Farhadi's best, and most of what is good in its second half is her, in the corner of frames that have drifted to her husband. Leila's Brothers puts a woman's name in the title again. Start with The Salesman, and this time keep watching her when the camera does not.
Biography
Taraneh Alidoosti is an Iranian actress. She trained at Amin Tarokh's acting school from 2000 and made her screen debut in the leading role in I'm Taraneh, 15 (2002), directed by Rasoul Sadrameli. For this performance she received the Bronze Leopard for Best Actress at the Locarno International Film Festival and the Crystal Simorgh for Best Actress at the Fajr Film Festival, becoming the youngest recipient of the latter award.
She has collaborated extensively with director Asghar Farhadi, appearing in Beautiful City (2004) as Firoozeh, Fireworks Wednesday (2006) as Roohi, About Elly (2009) in the title role, and The Salesman (2016) as Rana Etesami. Other notable film roles include those in Leila's Brothers (2022) and Subtraction (2022). She has also appeared in the television series Shahrzad (2015–2018) and works as a translator.
