When Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up premiered in early 1990 at Iran’s annual Fajr Film Festival, it caused little excitement among either filmgoers or critics. Kiarostami at the time was not regarded as among the very best of Iran’s filmmakers, and this, only his second feature since Iran’s 1979 Revolution, was regarded as more a curiosity than a solid success like his previous film, Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987).
A film that appears to be a documentary, though most viewers will quickly discern that it involves some fictionalizing (few initially suspect just how much), Close-Up relates the true story of a poor man named Hossein Sabzian, who was arrested for impersonating the film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf to a middle- class family in north Tehran, from whom he borrowed money and to whom he promised parts in “his” next film. Once he decided to make the film, Kiarostami persuaded Sabzian, the family and others to play themselves, and he and Makhmalbaf appeared in it as well. Given the sad and perhaps malicious nature of Sabzian’s crime, it’s not hard to see why Iranians in 1990 would have regarded the film as strange, discomfiting, maybe even a bit of a cultural embarrassment.
Once Close-Up left Iran, however, it started to meet with very different reactions, and its reputation began a rapid and decisive ascent. Though it was passed over by Cannes, New York and other top festivals, it was well received at a number of second-tier festivals and, more importantly, began to attract the attention of film critics in the West. As a result, Kiarostami was “discovered” by Cannes, which programmed his next film, And Life Goes On (a/k/a Life, and Nothing More...,
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1992), thereby launching the director (and his previous film) toward the heights of international renown. Within a few years, both Iranian and international critics would vote Close-Up the best Iranian film ever made; at decade’s end, American critics polled by Film Comment voted Kiarostami the most important director of the 1990s.
I first encountered Close-Up in the autumn of 1992, at the first festival of post-Revolutionary Iranian films presented at New York’s Lincoln Center. Writing about it in Film Comment, I offered this analogy: Imagine if, in France a couple of decades earlier, a man had been arrested for impersonating François Truffaut and, before he came to trial, Jean-Luc Godard got involved and filmed the rest of the proceedings. That comparison was intended to suggest a kinship between the concerns of the French New Wave and those on display in Kiarostami’s film, of course; yet it was also meant to convey the surprise that I and others felt at seeing a film like Close-Up emerge from Iran. Such sophisticated cinematic self-consciousness one might expect from Paris. But Tehran? 1
At the time, it was still news even among dedicated cinephiles and globe-trotting critics that something serious was afoot in Iran’s cinema, which had been all but destroyed a little over a decade before in the Iranian Revolution. After a government initiative to rebuild the nation’s film industry in the mid-’80s (a program that included the objective of making “artistic” films that would win friends for the Islamic Republic abroad), the films that began trickling into international festivals and gaining acclaim were noted
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