Thoughts on Kiarostami's Close-Up
The plot in brief
Close-up is a riveting tale of a poor man named Hossain Sabzian, who impersonates the famous filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf and dupes the Ahankhah family into believing that they would be starring in his next film. The film is primarily centered around Sabzian's trial. In the end, he is pardoned for his young age and having expressed genuine remorse for his actions. He finally gets to meet Makhmalbaf himself, and they visit the Ahankhahs together.
The film stands out in how the events are portrayed: it does not try to justify Sabzian's actions, but his personal story and his emotions allow us to empathize with him.
In this post, I plan to write down what I noted down while watching the film.
Sabzian's motive
Growing up, Sabzian loved art and movies. He would play games with his friends where he pretended to be a film director. So, when the opportunity came along, he pretended to be a famous film director in front of the Ahankhah family. The family fell for his charade, and he felt a swelling of confidence as he was able to convince them that he was a film director. Even though he remained the same person, with little to no money to his name and living a life of abject poverty, he found a new window of hope in the form of pretending to be a film director—a charade that made him feel what it is like to live like someone he wanted to be growing up.
Sabzian's charade was also guided by a sense of desperation over making ends meet. As the day of his arrest approached, he started feeling that this play would soon end with his arrest. But he could not stop himself from visiting the family because of the respect and admiration he could inspire from them—something which he could never do being his true poor self. Moreover, he also felt this could help him financially as well.
Nudged by his abject poverty and the tantalizing opportunity of playing the role of a film director and being admired for it, along with the chance of financial help, he allowed himself to be carried away into performing the role of the famous director and pulling the wool over their eyes.
He borrowed money so that even his child could, for some time, feel what it is like to be the child of a famous film director.
The Personal Touch in Movies
Whenever Sabzian felt depressed or overwhelmed, he wanted to pour out his soul. But his expressions went unnoticed. Then he discovered the cinema of Makhmalbaf, who he felt expressed his sorrows and sufferings through his art. He was enamored with his cinema and watched it many times.
Art is the cultivation of the experience of what you've felt inside.
Sabzian wanted the whole Ahankhah family to go see the movie 'The Cyclist' so that they could appreciate him more as a film director. Instead of thinking of film directors as detached from the hardships of society, he wanted to show them that film directors could indeed see the sufferings of society and the struggle of the less-fortunate ones as though he himself were a part of that group. He wished to show them films as he saw them himself—telling personal stories with characters that can be related to by those who think their stories are not being told.