In the moral parable ‘The Salesman’, Taraneh Alidoosti plays a stunning central role, a married actress who is assaulted by a stranger in her apartment; her performance as she struggles to cope with post-trauma stress has earned the audience’s admiration

For her lead role in Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning film ‘The Salesman’, actress Taraneh Alidoosti, 33, has been selected by Tribeca Film Festival in New York as one of the 10 best film performances by an actress of early 2017.

In an attempt not to let “the exemplary screen performances disappear into the second-half of the year,” the American festival has chosen ten of the most impressive performances by an actress from the first six months of the year, each one a “captivating, character-specific triumph that is worth visiting (and revisiting) within the coming months”, the festival website (tribecafilm.com) reported.

The name of Iranian actress has appeared in the list along with world famous figures including Kirsten Dunst (for the movie ‘The Beguiled’), Salma Hayek (Beatriz at Dinner), Holly Hunter (The Big Sick) and Kristen Stewart (Personal Shopper) among others.

In the moral parable ‘The Salesman’, Alidoosti plays the role of Rana, a married actress who is assaulted by a stranger one night in a new apartment. While her husband, Emad (performed by Cannes award-winning actor Shahab Hosseini) attempts to determine the identity of the attacker, she struggles to cope with post-trauma stress.

Alidoosti delivers a stunning central role that earns the audience’s admiration for what she both does and does not do. She refuses to embroider the character with personal touches or make her exceptional in ways that transcend the confined events and traumatic revelations depicted within the film.

This daring lack of distinctiveness could conceivably run the risk of alienating the audience; however, the actress’s sterling, measured technique does not let it happen.

Her watchful restraint consummately traces the arc of every woman struggling to collect her bearings after a harrowing encounter, all the while privately pushing back against a role which she never intended to play – that of victim.