What a magic trick this movie is. An odd courtroom case is filmed by the camera, the person charged is studied in the frame, everyday people are asked to become actors and recreate what they experienced, and the result offers a complexity of meanings and readings, but also depending on your viewing experience, it also illicts an emotional reaction by its final frame. Close-Up (1990) is a Persian film from Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami, a docu-drama about the crime of a person, Hossain Sabzain, pretending to be another, acclaimed Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Sabzain as Makhmalbaf tricked a wealthier family into spending time with them, pretending to start a film project and subsequently borrowing money, a charade that couldn’t last a week before he was found out. The case is a curiosity, a misdemeanour where no-one was hurt, though people were fooled and money taken. The man explains to the court and the camera that he loves movies, he loves this director, and to impersonate him gives him status where in his actual life he has none. The majority of Close-Up takes place in the courtroom where the case is being heard and Kiarostami’s crew is filming and he is able to ask questions during the proceedings, the camera putting Sabzain in close-up, allowing us to try and read him. Is this a performance? Why did this happen? How does cinema affect the people it intends to represent, particularly if they have no agency? The themes and layers swim through the ether surrounding this film, its style patient and observational, until we are wholly engaged in a human face, in a relationship between an individual and the cinema, and how that relationship can both trick and move us at different points. I heard Close-Up was great, and it was. I think I was fully on board by the first ten minutes when Kiarostami films a taxi driver waiting outside the family’s home before Sabzain’s arrest, the taxi driver picking through a hill of rubble for flowers, a side-story to the actual story but given precendence and space in the filmmaker recording this action. I am under the spell of each Kiarostami’s film I see of his for the first time (Taste Of Cherry I watched late one night when I was unwell and it had a slow power over me during and afterwards). I look forward to seeing more of his work and Makhambaf’s as well. I streamed Close-Up on the Criterion Channel. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 