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. 

the wind will carry us (w&d abbas kiarostami)

The film’s title makes it sound as though this might be an Iranian version of a Douglas Sirk movie. In practice this film couldn’t be further from melodrama, or even drama. Essentially, it’s a study of an engineer who visits a remote rural village with a team of work companions who are never seen and spends most of his time trying to find reception for his mobile phone. His phone has no problem ringing, but he cannot hear what’s being said. So he runs across the village, gets into his car, drives up a hill, gets out of the car, and speaks to someone in Tehran. Either his boss or his family. This happens approximately 75 times. The use of repetition is clearly deliberate, but the intention behind this use of repetition remained cryptic. The engineer’s desperate need to communicate? The chasm that exists between rural and urban Iranian society? All of the above? The engineer also befriends a boy, who is constantly (repeatedly) sitting exams. At the end of the film someone falls into a hole they have been digging but gets out alive. Which in some ways felt like a metaphor for watching the movie. I realise that Kiarostami is considered a genius, and I think I’ve seen other films of his which I engaged with more readily, but I have to confess to a feeling of bemusement brought on by The Wind Will Carry Us, a film whose hermitic qualities escaped me upon this occasion. Having said that, there is always the subjectivity of the moment to consider when watching cinema; perhaps on another day the film might indeed have blown me away.