you oughta been in pictures
by
Douglas Messerli
Abbas
Kiarostami (writer and director) کلوزآپ ، نمای نزدیک (Klūzāp, nemā-ye nazdīk), (Close-Up)
/1990
Abbas
Kiarostami’s 1990 film Close-Up begins
simply enough. A journalist has hired a taxi and, along with two policeman,
makes a visit to the pleasant home of the Akankhah family. After the journalist
enters alone, he returns to the taxi, and, joined by the policemen, returns to
the house where they arrest Hossain Sabzian.
Given the horrors about Iranian state
arrests we often hear told in the West, the incident seems almost comical. What
is the relationship between the journalist, Hossain Farazmand, and the two
young policeman, and who is this timid man, Sabzian, who have they just quietly
arrested? On camera, incidentally, all the figures are played by themselves.
Has the film’s director, Kiarostami, also tagged along with these men, or is
this a film segment made “after the fact?”
The rest of the film, primarily through
the scenes of Sabzian’s trial—which again Kiarostami is filming, after he has
convinced a judge that he should be able to document it (the only oddest thing
about Iranian justice is the strange liaisons made between the police and
others)—which reveals Sabzian’s almost inconsequential crime.
Again, in a scene apparently shot in
retrospect, we see the accidental bus meeting between Sabzian and Mrs.
Akankhah. A near-enclyopedic cinephile, Sabzian is reading the script of
popular Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The Cyclist. (He was also a fan of the films of Lars von Triers, it was revealed after his
death)
When Mrs. Akankhah expresses interest in the script—she has been taken to the
movie by her two film-loveing sons—Sabzian tells her that he, himself, is the
director; he quickly signs the book for her and gives it to her as a gift,
promising, after he procures her address, to visit her cinema-loving family.
Indeed, after a few days, he does appear
at their home, enchanting the sons and her daughter, and promising them to try
to film a movie, using them as actors. Who wouldn’t be delighted? The two
brothers, both engineers by education, have been unable to find work in the
current Iranian economy, one of them now heading a bakery company; but what
these brothers truly desire is careers in film, and now one of Iran’s greatest
directors seems to be offering just that possibility.
Sabzian promises to return again,
borrowing, from one of the brothers, 1,900 tomans for the taxi home, claiming
he has forgotten to bring his billfold. If anything, the family is charmed by
the director’s absent-mindedness.
Soon after, however, Mr. Akankhah, begins
to suspect that Sabzian is a fraud; yet still the family puts him up for a
night. Sabzian’s next visit to the house, however, is the one we have witnessed
in the first scene, wherein the poor dreamer is arrested for fraud.
After the Akankhah’s quietly lay out in
detail how they have been defrauded, the judge asks Sabzian for his own version
of the events. With Kiarostami’s focusing in on a close-up of his face, the
handsome young man (who does, indeed look something like the real Makhmalbaf)
describes how much that director’s films have meant to him, and how The Cyclist, in particular, has made him
feel that he and his class are not completely ignored: “For me, art is the
experience of what you’ve felt inside.” Although he has never made such an
assertion before, the temporary belief that he was a man of importance instead
of a destitute being who cannot even buy his own children food, made him feel
like a real human being, a man of importance, who could make decisions about
his own life instead of being subject to the entire society’s whims.
What is even more startling—as the young
identity-thief speaks of his life of poverty and dreams, about which the
audience can only be moved—is his revelation that what he truly would like to
have been was an actor. But, of course, he is now being a kind of actor, with Kiarostami’s camera framing his
face with a close-up that Nora Desmond would have died for.
With the agreement of the Akankhah
family, the judge releases him, and with the real Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Sabzian
returns to the Akankhah home to apologize for his deceit, the great Iranian
director (being filmed by the now great Iranian director Kiarostami) hugging
the would-be actor/director rather imperiously proclaiming: "I hope he'll
be good now and make us proud of him."
In a sense, of course, Kiarostami’s
camera, which has so carefully recorded Sabzian’s own defense, has already made
us “proud” of him, as we have been enchanted by what we now perceive as his
truth-telling and his own humility. And by the end of this mesmerizing film it
is difficult to determine who, precisely, is manipulating who. Has the society,
which has not lived up to its promises, forced young dreamers like the Akankhah
brothers to desperately seek out any possible “breaks” in the walls of
inopportunity that surround them? Is Makhmalbaf, by agreeing to be in
Kiarostami’s film, simply taking advantage of a desperate liar, who desired to
be someone other than himself? Is Kiarostami, himself, leaping into the fray
simply to transform a simple case of identity fraud into a statement about his
own narrative concerns? Is there really any future in this world for someone
like Hossain Sabzian?
After a few months of attention, Sabzian
was basically forgotten; strangely just before his death at age 52, he had attempted
to act in another documentary about his life, but he collapsed in the Metro on
his way to the interview, and died a few days later in a coma. Kiarostami, when
he saw his own movie again, years later, admitted that he couldn’t sleep for
several days, and was disturbed by his own intrusion into Sabzian’s life. This
docu-drama remains, however, a forever haunting statement about how film
inherently is a necessary space where dreamers cannot separate themselves from
the dreams they desire.
Los Angeles,
April 10, 2017
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