was eager to make amends with the older directors he’d attacked — especially Kiarostami.
Such was the situation in the fall of 1989 when a Tehran magazine reported that a man named Hossein Sabzian had been arrested for posing as Makhmalbaf to a middle-class family, the Ahankhahs. The two directors met in Kiarostami’s office and discussed the article. Each later claimed it was his idea to make a film about the case, but Kiarostami eventually prevailed. Later that day, he and Makhmalbaf went to the Ahankhahs’ house and persuaded them to participate. Later still, the imprisoned Sabzian and the mullah- judge in charge of his case were also enlisted, along with the article’s reporter and others.
This is what usually astonishes non-Iranians encoun- tering Close-Up: All the people in it, from the family to the mullah-judge to Sabzian to the soldiers who arrest him, seem completely bedazzled by cinema. Although Sabzian and the Ahankhahs gaze at each from across the great divide of class (he is poor, though a prodigious autodidact), they are united in their love of movies. Yet even within this common, unifying regard there are subtle differences. For the Ahankhahs, it seems safe to say, Makhmalbaf is of in- terest as a recognized artist whose work has begun winning international awards. (Indeed, they are tipped off to Sabzian’s imposture when he doesn’t know that Makhmalbaf has recently won a prize in Italy.) For Sabzian, on the other hand, as for many lower-class Iranians who know little of international cinema, Makhmalbaf is a hero for portraying their suffering in films such as The Peddler (1989) and The Cyclist (1987),
suffering that bespeaks the Revolution’s failure to lift them out of their abject positions in Iranian society.
To the poor man, then, cinema is not merely an escape. It is a mirror of his own desperate life, and just possibly, a way of transforming it — a means of salvation. And the director is something more than just a courageous truth teller. He’s an image of one’s uplifted, redeemed self — a savior figure.
What does Kiarostami make of all this? By the time of Close-Up, he,
arguably more than any other
Iranian director, had come to embody the auteurist idiosyncrasy and iconoclasm championed by Hoveyda and Ghaffary. And once he got into making the film, it’s clear he was ready to follow Forough Farrokhzad’s example of fusing documentary and fiction in an emotional, personal, formally inventive way that evokes the model of poetry. (Throughout, Close-Up is full of subtle, deliberate symmetries. To take just one striking example, notice the “rhyming” use of flowers in front of the Ahankhahs’ house at the film’s beginning and end.)
All that notwithstanding, Kiarostami is a skeptical intellectual, so it must be wondered: Did he start the film intending to skewer the credulous cinephilia of the Ahankhahs, to mock the cult of the director and especially Makhmalbaf, whom he disliked and slightly feared? These things are very possible. If they were true, then Kiarostami changed, and undoubtedly what changed him was the person of Hossein Sabzian, the man who would be Makhmalbaf, the unfortunate who sacrificed everything for cinema.
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