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Cast: Hossain Sabzian, Abbas Kiarostami, the Ahankahah family, Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Directed by: Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami said once, “We can never get close to the truth except through lying”. In Close-up, an amalgam of a movie and a documentary, the lines between fact and fiction are blurred to such an extent that you never know whether you are watching real footage on the screen or just a re-enactment representing the director’s vision.

The undistinguished protagonist of this movie, Sabzian is accused of a crime. And he is guilty. He passed himself off as the celebrated Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf to an old lady he met on a bus. He had just bought the book, ‘The cyclist’ by the director. Instead of telling her where he bought the book, on an impulse he told her, he himself was Makhmalbaf. But why would a famous director like him be traveling on a public bus? He was just scouting for material for his new movie.

During the next few weeks, he gets close to and becomes friendly with the lady’s family (the Ahankhahs). He tells them that he would be using their house for shooting and they would be playing important roles in the new movie. When his fraud is revealed they accuse Sabzian of stealing from them and of deviously insinuating himself into their lives, so that he can rob their house afterwards.

Now Kiarostami decides to film his trial and re-enact the sequence of events with all the characters playing themselves. Technically speaking, it is an extreme ‘cinema-verite’ style of filmmaking stripped of all glamour and sensation. He manages to capture the essence of verite or ‘cinema of truth’ in multiple forms.

He never makes it less than obvious to the viewer that he is watching a movie. In a post-trial scene, their audio equipment starts malfunctioning and the audio gets blacked out for long intervals. The director with his camera forms the omniscient audience, which introduces the inescapable fiction component in the true actions of the characters.

During the 1990s the Iranian new wave appeared on the world-stage in the form of humanistic works by Makhmalbaf, Majidi, Kiarostami and several other directors. In spite on strict censorship, their path-breaking works emerged. While it was great art for the rest of the world, for the Iranians it must have been something more. Their own were telling their stories, depicting their internal and external lives in a manner, unvarnished by political rhetoric. These were not movies with a message in the western sense. They needn’t need to be because they captured the essence of the medium of cinema.

After interacting with the soft-spoken Sabzian for an hour or so, the audience can begin to understand his deep love for cinema, the drabness and nothingness of his own life…and how being Makhmalbaf enabled him to be a ‘somebody’ at least for some time.

In the last segment of this movie Makhmalbaf himself makes an appearance. He goes to meet the family he deceived, with Makhmalbaf. There, Sabzian breaks down in an intense moment of joyful catharsis.
In his attempts to capture the motivations of Sabzian, Kiarostami explores the power of cinema in its numerous forms. Good cinema as entertainment, hope and inspiration for an ordinary person on the street. And cinema as life itself…