Harlem Renaissance poet, Langston Hughes, famously asked, “What happens to a dream deferred?” What does deprivation do to a person’s spirit and morals? Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (1990) evokes these questions in the suffering of Iranian print-maker Hossain Sabzian, who, charged for appropriating film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s identity, longs for a life that never was nor ever could be his.
The film’s central character is a man of modest means, though his dreams are big; roused by the narratives captured in Makhmalbaf’s films, Sabzian aspires to a life of resonant storytelling and art. When he one day tells an inquiring woman, Mrs. Ahankhah, that he is responsible for directing a film credited to Makhmalbaf, he neither expects to maintain the novel identity nor get fiercely tangled in her family’s affairs. Yet, after a series of visits to the Ahankhahs’ home and promises to direct a new film on their property, the so-called “Makhmalbaf” becomes enraptured by a status, a dream, never afforded to him before. But it is not long before his enchantment is smothered; when Mr. Ahankhah’s suspicions result in the alleged director’s arrest, Sabzian’s whimsey turns him into a criminal.
Kiarostami’s film, featuring scenes from Sabzian’s trial and reenactments staged by the participants themselves, resists categorisation. However, it is precisely Close-Up’s generic ambiguity that lends itself to the unconventional telling of a story about being and seeming, truth and dogma, experience and history. The essence of his story is deeply political and sentimental, the two being inexorably linked; that his complainants stubbornly posit their beliefs and suspicions as truth represents the system that turns his disenfranchisement into a criminal offence; a system which constructs history on the bones of censored truths, negating individual nuance and feeling.
It is perhaps with this understanding that, moments before the trial, Kiarostami tells the defendant: “This camera is here so you can explain things that people might find hard to understand or accept… explain it to this camera” (Kiarostami, 1990). The camera cannot exonerate Sabzian from his fierce critics. It cannot elevate his status. In front of and away from the camera, he is still a poor man who deceived and exploited a family under the pretence that he was an acclaimed director. Kiarostami, intuitively aware of the potential reverberations of Sabzian’s episode in the world of cinema, instead uses the camera to immortalise the weight of deprivation that plagues those with no means of making art and explore the lengths to which one may go for a mere imitation of one’s dreams. Capturing and sharing these sentiments, Close-Up very much becomes a film about cinema––in particular, its power to make visceral that which may otherwise be too contentious or complex to appreciate. It is also a film that protests history’s tendency to characterise as corrupt those whose suffering sees no compassion. Thus, the camera is a vehicle through which Sabzian is able to humanise himself in the face of history. Sharing his desires and adversity, he is no longer just a con artist who implicated himself in a crime. He becomes a man of literature and film; of acute feeling and sensibility. He is not a criminal, but a victim of circumstance.
While the latter half of the film succeeds in this characterisation of Sabzian, it remains unclear whether, within the parameters of the plot itself, his story actually achieves redemption. In conversation with the complainant, Mr. Ahankhah, before his arrest, Sabzian reflects on the importance of immersing oneself in nature to one’s identity: “One must be in touch with the colours of nature to remove the rust covering one’s heart. I asked, ‘Why is your face hidden from me?’ She replied, ‘You yourself are the veil, for my face is revealed’” (Kiarostami, 1990). Forty days after his initial visit, the remorseful Sabzian appears outside the Ahankhah home, clutching a pot of red flowers. He is Makhmalbaf no longer; he does not don that veil anymore. He appears, flowers in hand, as if to say This is me. I am Hossain Sabzian and I am sorry. But over the intercom, Mr. Ahankhah does not recognise the stranger’s name. It is only after the real Makhmalbaf, standing beside Sabzian, reveals himself to their host that the two are permitted entry. Thus, within the film’s plot, Sabzian’s reputation isn’t favourably restored. He merely assumes the same inconsequential role to which he was subject before he appropriated Makhmalbaf’s identity, and the film ends there.
There are, however, the broader implications of the Ahankhahs’ performance; that the family join Sabzian in a retelling of his experience suggests that they, somewhere along the way, found faith and value in the authenticity of his story. Beyond the questions that seem to remain untouched in the film’s finale is the inescapable awareness that the participants reunited in a retrospective reenactment and exploration of the events passed. Thus, film no longer becomes instrumental merely in the making of history or in revealing some truth; for those involved in this story, storytelling is the difference between resentment and forgiveness. Storytelling is an instrument of healing.
Close-Up is the product of exceptional compassion; it is a film that seizes a personal story at its most critical point—at the intersection between reality and history—and with great tenderness renders the whimsies and woes of a man deprived of his dream. It’s a film that reminds its audience that it’s not necessarily or solely a work itself that lends artistic status—it is the truth one captures and shares.
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