close up (w&d abbas kiarostami)

The playful intellectualism of Iranian cinema seems to have echoes in the mind games of Rio Plantense cinema. This is what happens when you yoke cerebral educated filmmakers who don’t have a capitalist imperative to the artform. See also Communist era Poland.  There’s something Borgesian about Close-Up, with its imagined film within a film and its impersonating director. But there’s also a tragic social history there, as the impersonator, Hossain Sabzian, a film lover with no hope of ever making a film, indulges his Walter Mitty life for a while. Sabzian is so disarmingly charming and unassuming, playing himself in the movie, that you cannot help but root for him. The humanism that underpins Kiarostami’s vision is also indicative of Iranian cinema’s progressive agenda, which seems so little in keeping with the country’s official or apparent politics over the course of the last thirty years. In addition, the very fact that Sabzian’s fraud is constructed around the fame of a director speaks of a society that  values cinema in a way that the West does not. Even our most famous directors, the likes of Nolan, Mendes or Macqueen, are unlikely to be recognised in the improbable event they decided to go rogue and travel on public transport.