Close-Up

Year: 1990
Director: Abbas Kiarostami

The seventeenth greatest film of all time, according to critics in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll, is not an easy film to see. Not on any streaming service (including the BFI Player) currently. The Criterion Collection edition is helpfully embedded on the wikipedia page for the film, so we watched that.

The con artist is an enduring film trope – what’s more natural to act out than a scene in which one person (at least) is already acting (‘lying for money’). From The Night of the Hunter, Hustle and The Grifters to Bowfinger (a film which bizarrely can be seen as kin to this masterpiece) film has been fascinated by er the grifter and the con artist.

Kiarastami’s starting point is a real story. A poor man struggling to feed his family, Hossain Sabzian, is sitting next to a well-dressed woman on a bus when she notices his book, a screenplay written by a famous Iranian film director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Quick as a flash he says he is Makhmalbaf and soon has an invitation to visit the woman’s family. Over the next few days he insinuates himself into her household, under the pretext of looking at their house as a location for his next film. The husband grows increasingly suspicious, and rings a journalist he knows who confirms Sabzian is an imposter. We start the story in the middle, as the journalist and police arrive at the house to arrest Sabzian.

This summary only scratches the surface of what Close-Up is about. The film is an extra-ordinary act of recreation: from Sabzian to the duped family members, the journalist, and ultimately the trial judge everyone is playing themselves and re-creates the story for the cameras. The feat of negotiation, planning and charm necessary to get, for example, the prosecutor and trial judge to reprise their speech and actions for the camera can only be guessed at. Most of the heavy lifting is carried by Sabzian (the real Sabzian) who appears in almost every scene and has long speeches of impersonation, and justification in the court-room. It’s a stunning performance by a non-actor. For the power of film-making, Kiarastami suggests, is irresistible. If a Palme D’Or winner comes calling with a film-crew who is able to resist. The presence of the camera charges and changes everything. There’s a beautiful moment at the start of the court case when Kiarastami explains to Szabian how he’s going to be filmed, and outside the police station where the real police try and edge into the shot.

Kiarastami has a coup de theatre saved for the end which I won’t reveal. Though it sticks to a documentary format for the majority of the movie, there’s a sequence involving a motorbike ride through Tehran which is a stunningly filmed piece of mock documentary, down to the recreated mic cutting out. This is not at times an easy watch – the central court sequence has its longeurs in particular, but Kiarastami’s control and release of information is a textbook example of audience manipulation. Like the family, we too are duped by film and the impersonators onscreen.

Might appeal to people who enjoyed:

It’s a singular piece, but certainly people who enjoy films about film.

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