Friday, April 8, 2011
Film Special Screening: Close Up This Weekend at Belcourt
Posted by Jim Ridley on Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 7:31 AM
I wrote this back in 2000, when the movie screened in Nashville for the very first time. If you missed it then ... well, read on.
Close Up is the funniest and most accessible of the four films I’ve seen by Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian director who’s shaping up as one of the movies’ modern-day masters. Four movies hardly makes me an expert: Although Kiarostami’s post-1990 films have been the first to reach an American audience beyond the festival circuit, he’s been making movies since 1970. But the first movie I saw by him, 1997’s Taste of Cherry, had a sense of life within and beyond the boundaries of the frame that made the worlds of most movies look narrow and half-imagined. The same is true of the amazing Close Up, which was made in 1990 but is just getting its American release.“We can never get close to the truth except through lying,” Kiarostami once said. That sly, suggestive paradox rests at the heart of Close Up, a one-of-a-kind movie that turns the forms of drama and documentary into an elaborate hall of mirrors. The more distorted the reflection gets, the more truth the director sees. The movie takes off from a puzzling real-life court case in which a destitute man, Hossein Sabzian, was accused of defrauding the Ahankhahs, a well-to-do Tehran family. Sabzian had claimed to be Kiarostami’s colleague, the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf; to maintain the ruse, he borrowed money from the family, scouted out their house for locations, and promised to use their sons as actors.
Some of Kiarostami’s movies use the shooting of his own previous films as a starting point; if this situation hadn’t existed, Kiarostami might well have invented it. And that’s just what the director does, in a sense, when he goes to the real-life participants — Sabzian, the Ahankhahs, the presiding judge — and asks permission to film the trial.
The move suddenly makes him an active participant in the story. We see him negotiating with Sabzian, a sort of benign version of The King of Comedy’s Rupert Pupkin, who’s delighted to make the career move from fake director to real actor. (“Could you make a film about my suffering?” he asks the director hopefully.) We learn his strategy for filming the trial, with a camera for close-ups of the plaintiffs and defendant. We even overhear discussions about scheduling the trial to accommodate filming. But Kiarostami takes an additional step that leads the whole project into Lewis Carroll territory. He scripts out dramatic reenactments of the story — then hires the real-life participants to play themselves.
One of Kiarostami’s pet themes is the interaction between movies and life, and how the inadequacies of one at depicting the other form their own kind of truth. This approach hits delirious comic extremes in Close Up. Pressed into service as actors, the family members rebel against Kiarostami’s scripted take on the situation. The father complains that he was on to the fake Makhmalbaf all along, while his son argues the whole family wised up. (The mother just wants it on the record that her other son isn’t a lowly baker — he’s a bread manager.) When the director interviews a soldier early on, the man’s comrades line up stiffly in the background like models.
The intrusion of Kiarostami’s camera creates an unmistakable distortion in the world: The director is a one-man uncertainty principle. But even that distortion says something about the ways people behave when they think they’re being watched, and about the effect of media scrutiny. The Ahankhahs may be trying to convict Sabzian of fraud, but in Kiarostami’s funhouse construction, the only difference between fraud and acting is the presence of a movie camera. The biggest liars are the ones who deceive themselves that they can capture the unvarnished truth — reporters, documentarians. Sabzian tells the judge he couldn’t be a thief; he defines a thief as someone in disguise, who arrives in a borrowed car clutching a briefcase. The reporter following the story pulls up in a cab with an attaché case. “We are slaves of a mask hiding our true face,” goes the film’s stated credo. “If we free ourselves from this, the beauty of truth will be ours.” Who passes along this wisdom? Sabzian.
To confuse what’s real with realism even more, the courtroom footage is flat and washed-out compared to the vivid hues of Kiarostami’s reenactments. What’s funny, though, is how much reality seeps in around the corners of this construct. Kiarostami has a fluid, wandering style that searches around in the frame, alert to whatever possibilities arise. For something like this in American movies, you have to go back to Robert Altman’s early-’70s prime. As his camera explores the Ahankhahs’ neighborhood, with its walled-in homes, neat streets, and heaps of leaves and discarded aerosol cans, Kiarostami’s method allows for incidental details about life in contemporary Tehran, from the scarcity of jobs to attending different movie theaters based on the level of censorship. Everyone and everything has a story. The effect is like going to see an exhibit for one painting and getting sidetracked not just by the other paintings but also by the security guard and the guy out front asking directions.
As it turns out, Sabzian isn’t a would-be robber. He’s a movie lover who gets drunk on the power of the director’s role, in every sense of the word, and he’s a jobless man who finds out how much difference access to a camera makes in the way he’s treated. He tells the wise judge that he wanted to be “a director who is aware of people’s sufferings and failings ... a director who is modest enough to mix with ordinary folk.” Such a director arrives in the piercingly humane sequence that ends Close Up: the real Mohsen Makhmalbaf, whose reaction is a real surprise. But there’s another director whose presence is always in the background of this unforgettable movie — and who seems as surprised and delighted by its developments as his viewers.
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