Iranian Hossain Sabzian is riding a bus in Tehran, reading “The Cyclist”, the published screenplay of a film by Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Sabzian is poor, adrift, but a huge cinephile. Mother Mahrokh Ahankhah sits down next to Sabzian and the two strike up a conversation about the book—when Sabzian suddenly claims he is writer/director Makhmalbaf, himself. He autographs the book for Mrs. Ahankhah, they swap information, and soon he is at the Ahankhah house to meet the family and discuss film. He eats with them, borrows some money, and suggests he’d like to make a film at their house and cast them. After a few days, the Ahankhah family begins to suspect foul play. They contact a reporter and the police, who come to their house and arrest Sabzian. Sabzian is sent to prison and tried for fraud. At the trial, the Ahankhah’s are clearly cheesed-off for being taken for a ride but are persuaded by the judge to to pardon Sabzian in the hopes he never does this again and can become a productive member of society. At the end of the film, director Abbas Kiarostami organizes for the actual director Mohsen Makhmalbaf to meet Sabzian and gather with the Ahankhah’s to cultivate forgiveness.
“Close-Up” is one of the most strange and fascinating films I’ve ever seen. It’s a “docufiction film”, not only “based on a true story” but a reenactment of it. The film is part documentary and features real footage (I believe the film of Sabzian’s trial is genuine). However, in addition to documentary footage, director Abbas Kiarostami convinced EVERYONE involved to come back and act as themselves to reenact the scenes leading up to the story breaking. The taxi driver who seems uninterested in the case came back. The reporter who showed up to his big-break case without a tape recorder and whose facts were questioned in-film came back. The judge who didn’t think the case was important came back. The Ahankhah’s came back to record the moment of their deceit. And Sabzian came back to give the world an eye into the sadness of his existence and the fraud that he committed. And uniquely, each of them were mostly decent actors! The film blends these people’s actual thoughts/feelings with performances (of themselves) to assemble a narrative of this strange case.
The result is a film that doesn’t simply tell a real story, it lives it—however suspenseful or boring that story could be. The film opens from the taxi driver’s point of view as he takes the reporter and the police to the Ahankhah’s. We hear the basic facts behind the case but see the driver is ultimately uninterested and bored as the arrest takes place off-camera. Later in the film, we see the arrest take place and Sabzian is genuinely expressive, depicting both grief and anxiety as the police come—to pretended to arrest him, like they did before. By blending documentary footage with reenactments, a line was blurred in a way that felt beyond-real. Was the camera’s eye picking up a genuine moment or expression? Or is the camera infusing an artistic, enhanced meaning in mundane elements of the case? For example, early in the film, we see a can of spray paint roll down a hill and the camera stays on it for ~60 seconds. Moments later, the reporter kicks the can further down the road. Was this a silly half-remembered detail of the day of the arrest? Or was it avant-garde symbolism for wealthy Iranians’ contempt for the poor, or disrespect of artistic expression, or simply a marker that the the events of the film are about to be set into motion? I don’t know.
This film was difficult for me to rate in the conventional sense. It wasn’t always entertaining. The case was low-stakes and unusual. But as an experiment, “Close-Up” is one of the most fascinating films I’ve ever watched. As a guy with part-Iranian heritage, I felt like I got a better-than-normal glimpse into life in Tehran: a hilly city with autumn leaves, and traffic, and real people, and all. And I got a real glimpse into Hossain Sabzian, a poor, sad man, neglected by society and who only feels understood by films that depict poor, sad lives. It was a stark reminder of why I do this silly film project and what these stories mean to the people who watch them.