Again another masterpiece. The last two films I’ve seen by Mr. Kiarostami, I’ve pushed the play button with a slight anxiety that I will finally be treated to a film by him that is only just ‘good.’ But my fears were alleviated with brevity as it only took a few minutes for me to become completely engrossed in everything about this film. The idea behind the story in this film is quite similar to the recent Colour Me Kubrick. I’m almost convinced that that film is at least an homage and borderline plagiarizing the event that is depicted in this one (There are probably interviews with the filmmakers of Kubrick in which they cite Close-Up‘s influence, but I’m too lazy to look). In both Kubrick and Close-Up, the protagonists pretend that they are well-known filmmakers; John Malkovich portrays Alan Conway who pretends that he is the reclusive Stanley Kubrick, and Hossein Sabzian (portraying Hossein Sabzian) pretends that he is Mohsen Makhmalbaf, director of The Cyclist. Where Kubrick was a fictional account of a true story that emptily narrowed down Conway’s motivations to narcissism, boredom, and laziness, Kiarostami’s film is a subtle and complex study of the nature of fiction.
Sabzian’s brief life as Makhmalbaf is a true story; in fact, every single person seen in Close-Up other than Kiarostami is playing themselves and acting out the actual events as they happened. If they are leaving information out of the reenactment, they fooled me, because this is an incredibly detailed account of the days that Sabzian fooled and housed with the Ahankhah family. The film is intercut with actual footage that Kiarostami shot during the trial in with the Ahankhah family attempted to prosecute Sabzian. The film, like all of the Kiarostami’s that I’ve have seen so far save for Where is the Friend’s House?, takes a while to grasp in terms of what is fiction and what is non-fiction, and just how many layers of reality are being depicted. I think that one could argue that the entire film is fiction with someone who thinks that everything in the film is non-fiction, and both would probably be just as right and wrong as the other.
I love to imagine the production of this film, and how awkward it must have been for the Ahankhah family to film scenes with Sabzian after feeling so betrayed by him. An exaggerated example of this is if a filmmaker wanted to make a fictional film of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and cast Bill Clinton as Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton as Hillary Clinton, and Lewinsky as Lewinsky. The audacity of the idea is so good that it feels too good to be true, yet it is. The film ends with a typically moving moment of redemption and forgiveness. I haven’t seen a short or feature length film by Kiarostami yet that hasn’t ended with me somewhere between emotionally flustered and tears welling up, and none of these reactions are from sadness, but simply from blissful happiness.