From the time Kiarostami first interviews him in prison, his thin, bearded, saturnine face has the downcast expression and haunting eyes of a martyr (he even bears the name of the Prophet’s grandson, Imam Hossein, Shiism’s preeminent martyr). He pleads his case, his boundless love of cinema and admiration of the man who put his suffering in his films, his harmless intentions in befriending the Ahankhahs, an innocent ruse that ran away with him, evidently because it was the one time in his life that he got to feel important, admired, respected. It was a mistake perhaps, but one without malice.
In interviews, both Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf have indicated they never entirely believed Sabzian’s self-exculpatory account of himself. Yet Kiarostami, with Makhmalbaf’s complicity, nevertheless elected to make Close-Up a film that effectively exonerates Sabzian, literally frees him from prison, and gives him its benediction.
Kiarostami accomplishes this, in a remarkable feat of chimeric filmmaking, by constructing an elaborate fiction made of “real” people and events. Virtually everything in the film is either a reenactment or staged for the cameras. Sabzian’s arrest,
his
imprisonment, the recollection of his interactions with the Ahankhahs, and ultimately his emotional encounter with Makhmalbaf when he’s released: all are (re)invented by Kiarostami. Most extraordinary of all, after persuading the cleric-judge to allow him to film the proceedings that will decide Sabzian’s fate,
Kiarostami not only brings two 16mm cameras into the courtroom but inserts himself into the trial, asking Sabzian questions along with the judge and eliciting answers that he himself has scripted based on things Sabzian has said to him — monologues that offer some of the most powerful affirmations of the power of cinema in cinema.
In the end, Kiarostami and the judge smooth the way for the Ahankhahs to offer Sabzian their grudging forgiveness, a reconciliation that’s far more contrived than genuine. If this outcome is deceptive, it must be said that fakery of many sorts pervades the film. When Sabzian is released and Makhmalbaf comes to meet him, Kiarostami is filming from across the street (why?) and the sound is cutting in and out. These “sound problems,” it turns out, were mostly created in post-production: they force the viewer to “lean in,” to anticipate and yearn for the emotional epiphany that comes at the film’s end.
“We can only reach the truth through lies,” Kiarostami has said. In effect, Close-Up is a dense skein of lies, fabrications and deceptions that points us toward the truth that much of what we value in cinema comes from a merging of intentionalities: the director’s and our own. Like a celluloid prose-poem that infuses traditional Persian mysticism with modernist irony and wit, it invites us to see that we (along with Kiarostami) have effected Sabzian’s liberation, which is less a fact of one troubled man’s biography than a symbol of the cinematic imagination’s transformative powers.
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