Close-Up

In 1989 in Tehran, a movie mad unemployed printer named Ali Sabzian was arrested for impersonating the famous film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The Ahankah family, who had lent him money, was deep in rehearsals for his next "film" when they became suspicious and alerted authorities and Sabzian was arrested. Director Abbas Kiarostami read about the case in the Iranian magazine "Sorush" and, fortuitously, had a meeting with Makhmalbaf that same week. The directors offer somewhat different accounts as to whose idea the film was but after discussing it, they immediately visited the Ahankah family and convinced them to appear in the production, a real film this time with the real Makhmalbaf. Kiarostami later secured the participation of other figures in the story-Sabzian, the reporter Hassan Farazmand and the cleric judge trying the case-and shooting began before the case even went to court, with Kiarostami filming (and to some extent shaping) events as they unfolded and staging reenactments of earlier scenes. The resulting film, Close-Up, is neither documentary, docudrama nor dramatic interpretation, but something that mixes, merges and challenges them all. The case itself is hardly sensationalistic. Sabzian met Mrs. Ahankah on a bus and passed himself off as Makhmalbaf. Sabzian then pushed that simple bit of role playing into an elaborate charade when he proposed that the family act in his next film and he became a frequent visitor to their house, but the role playing takes on added dimensions within the context of the film: Kiarostami convinced Sabzian and the Ahankah family to play themselves in dramatic recreations. Intercut with these extended scenes, a mix of scripted dialogue and improvisation, is the documentary record of the real trial, which Kiarostami convinced the judge to let him not only film but stage for the camera (perhaps documentary is the wrong word; "actuality" may be more appropriate), and a series of on-camera interviews. What comes across most strongly is not the gap between dramatic recreation and documented "reality," but how in every venue the players put on their public faces for the camera, for the judge, for their fellow participants. Kiarostami pushes and pulls at our relationship to the screen story. He opens the film with an almost laughably bald bit of exposition as journalist Hossain Farazmand (playing himself in the recreation) explains the story to a pair of policeman on their way (in a taxi, of all things) to arrest Sabzian. As the police (accompanied by the reporter) go in to make the arrest, the camera remains outside the gates of the house with the cab driver, finding a quiet drama in the waiting: chatting with the cops, plucking flowers from a pile of leaves, kicking an aerosol can, with Kairostami watches roll and roll and roll down the hill. The drama is ostensibly happening in the house but Kiarostami withholds the story from us, or perhaps recasts it in new terms. And when the reporter reemerges (after a desperate search for a portable tape recorder) he gives that can a triumphant kick to end the scene. Long after the story is over, that aerosol can remains an indelible memory of the film: as a poetic flourish, a whimsical diversion and simply an image of the world picked out and dropped into the film. Later in the film, Kairostami finally brings us into the house to see the arrest scene that he withheld in the opening scene. Sabzian, who has never made a film, pours out his passion for cinema in long philosophical pronouncements on art and truth. The multiplicity of screens between performer and event is astounding: the real life con man, who escapes his lack of self esteem by play-acting the part of a great artist, now plays himself playing that part in a dramatic recreation. For those moments, as levels of reality and representation blur, he becomes a filmmaker in his own right. By the end of Close-Up the seeming simplicity of technique has given way to a remarkable complexity, like a Renoirian take on Citizen Kane where the truth is not found under the masks but in their fusion. In the final scenes, a brilliant mix of contrivance, intimacy, distance, and dramatic closure peered into like a voyeur, questions of performance and spontaneous action are tossed to the wind in a moment of emotional power. Maybe we are all actors on a stage, but that doesn't make our performance any less poignant. Or less real. The film has previously been available on DVD through Facets. Criterion has remastered the film from a new 35mm print, with a digital clean-up of surface grit and scratches, for both DVD (two discs) and Blu-ray (single disc) release. Needless to say, it's a superb job and a substantial improvement from the old Facets release, not only cleaner and clearer but with a sharp clarity to the 35mm scenes (which stand-out in contrast to the 16mm "actuality" footage). The commentary by Kiarostami scholars Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum is different than the usual scholarly track, which are generally carefully prepared audio essays scripted to the image track. Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum have obviously prepared but appear to go to it unscripted, taking scenes and details as they come and offering their perspectives in a give-and-take. Also features the 1996 documentary "Close-Up Long Shot" (following up on the real-life Ali Sabzian), the interview featurette "A Walk with Kiarostami" (conducted in 2001 by Iranian film professor Jamsheed Akrami while Kiarostami was in Edinburgh) and a new interview with Kiarostami conducted for this disc, plus a booklet with a new essay by Godfrey Cheshire. Most importantly, Criterion offers the American home video debut of a Kiarostami rarity: The Traveler, the 1974 film that Kiarostami considers it his first authentic feature and that Sabzian himself references in Close-Up ("I am the child from the film The Traveler who is left behind," he says at one point). The film, about a football-mad schoolboy who breaks every rule to see his favorite team play at the stadium far away in Tehran, has more in common with his films about children than with Close-Up but it shows the artist first mastering his art and his direction of actors. It's classic Kiarostami-a simple story of a journey by a school kid-in primordial form. His storytelling is more conventional, constructed with basic editing conventions (like shot-reaction shot patterns during conversations) that he would discard as he developed his long-take aesthetic, but his camera is already probing the anxieties, desires and determined natures of his characters by making a study of their faces and their body language. The print is decidedly low-fidelity, a 16mm production where the splices are at times visible, and the digital reproduction (while nowhere as painstakingly mastered and cleaned up as Close-Up) appears to be an accurate record of the original film. For more information about Close-Up, visit The Criterion Collection. To order Close-Up, go to TCM Shopping. by Sean Axmaker