Country: Iran
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Time: 1 hour and 37 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Kanopy (free w/library card); Criterion (free w/subscription); Amazon ($3.99 to rent)
What It Evokes: The power of movies, category collapses, the thin line between adoration and obsession
In exhilarated anticipation of an arrest he has helped facilitate, a journalist gets into a cab alongside two cops. He’s about to break the story that will make his name. Inside the cab, his garrulousness gets the better of him. He tells the driver, “Did you tell your agency this could take a while? It could run into the evening, and things might get tricky…It’s a strange story.” After explaining the strange story that has brought them all together, he reassures the driver, “If there’s any trouble, we’ll be in this together.” It’s both expository dialogue (journalist to taxi driver) and assurance (director to audience). When they finally arrive at their destination, the journalist notes, “How strange my biggest story should take place on a dead-end.” That’s the metaphor.
Here’s the story the journalist told, which also happens to true: An unemployed former print shop worker named Hossein Sabzian met a certain Ms. Ahankhah on a Tehran bus. Sabzian was reading the screenplay for The Cyclist (1987), a film written and directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf (whose work The Silence we have previously discussed). Over the course of their conversation, Sabzian adopted Makhmalbaf’s identity. Shortly after their meeting, the Ahankhahs invited Sabzian (who they believed to be a famous director) into their home. As Makhmalbaf, Sabzian discussed using their (rather grand) house as a possible shooting location and offered to cast their son in a future film. (The Ahankhahs come from a much higher social class than Sabzian.) Gratified at the attention lavished on them by a “well-known director”, the Ahankhahs offered Sabzian deference, open access to their property, and lent him some money. Everyone wanted the story to be true. Of course, it eventually ceased to add up. When Sabzian’s ruse finally came to light, the Akhankhahs perceived his detailed inspection of their home as evidence of intended robbery. Since they had lent him money he could not pay back, they pressed charges for petty fraud.
In actuality, a journalist (who plays the journalist in the film) wrote the story for a Tehran daily, where the film’s director Abbas Kiarostami encountered it. Soon thereafter, Kiarostami began filming Sabzian’s fraud trial. After the trial, Kiarostami asked Sabzian, the Ahankhahs, and others to re-enact their previous interactions (which, of course, were themselves performances). Kiarostami appears as Kiarostami. Sabzian and Makhmalbaf both play Makhmalbaf at different times. Art and life unstitched and re-stitched again.
Renowned for its formal inventiveness, Close-Up remains interested in dissolving distinctions across domains: the legal and the moral; the documentary and the feature; the overlooked and the scrutinized; the rich and the poor; the imagined and the real. Much of the film employs “documentary” footage from Sabzian’s trial into which the methods, materials, and conceits of filmmaking continually intrude: we watch Kiarostami ask a befuddled judge for permission to film; we watch him explain different camera shots (close-up and wide-angle) to Sabzian in the courtroom; we spot the sound engineer’s microphone creeping into shots (and, in the film’s particularly beautiful final sequence, cease functioning altogether). Throughout, Close-Up insists viewers abandon “the willful suspension of disbelief” that momentarily blurs representation and reality in order to underscore how performing and being are distinctions liable to collapse under close inspection.
The central trial around which the film orients itself only further reinforces this point: trials are performances, pieces of theater that aspire to separate truth from falsity and feature individuals playing prescribed roles. (You can already guess how we fit in.) Like Picasso’s introduction of collage in Still Life With Caning (1912), Close-Up employs different layers of representation at various removes from “reality” (re-enactments of impersonations of performances) in order to construct a cohesive work that challenges the very possibility of discrete representational modes.
The dissolution of film’s organizing categories has long been a preoccupation of certain Iranian directors. Forough Farrokhzad’s magisterial The House Is Black (1962), which consciously de-stabilized the documentary form, helped set the tone for later directors like Kiarostami and Jafar Pahani (No Bears, Jafar Panahi’s Taxi). In response to political and social repression, Iranian directors have long leveraged forms of experimentation in order to evade censors, taking oblique approaches to challenging topics in ways that unmoor film from its formal tenets and spur innovation. After all, the unclassifiable is always harder to ban.
Beyond its formal inventiveness, Close-Up remains a beautiful study of an individual’s aspirations and flaws, alongside art’s enduring impact. An obsessive cinephile, Sabzian’s admiration and adulation of Makhmalbaf has emerged out of the director’s unique focus on marginalized figures within Iranian society. As Sabzian notes, Iranian directors tend to make works about their own social class.1 By contrast, Makhmalbaf’s films have long identified with individuals whose sufferings and dashed hopes Sabzian recognizes.2
In turn, Sabzian reciprocates the identification. If Makhmalbaf understands him, he too understands Makhmalbaf. As Sabzian explains to the judge, his poverty prevented him from pursuing film-related work. Being Makhmalbaf redressed this injustice, while simultaneously re-orienting the social field within which Sabzian existed. Otherwise unavailable forms of attention, deference, and respect (temporarily) followed. Indeed, the film’s single greatest achievement may be that its formal ingenuity never attenuates its fundamental warmth, which culminates in one of film’s most moving and memorable final sequences: De-construction into unification.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Abbas Kiarostami — Where Is The Friend’s House (1987)
Abbas Kiarostami — Taste of Cherry (1997)
Asghar Farhadi’s great works A Separation (2011) or About Elly (2009) come to mind as examples of this.
Makhmalbaf’s film The Cyclist centers on an Afghan refugee who also “performs” a certain feat to raise money for his ill wife, only to lose himself in the process.