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.
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.
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.
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.
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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