There are those who would disagree with my use of "unpretentious" in the title of this article in reference to the film Close-Up. Either you believe in and go with the spontaneous spirit in this film, or you're actively working against your own enjoyment of many things. Yet others (or those same) would argue against "unassuming", claiming that to "get" the movie, you have to be into films from the Middle East, or just a pretentious prick. Such people are said pretentious pricks.
Some upcoming parts of my Cinema Ozu series deal directly with notable filmmakers who have cited Ozu as a profound influence. Of the lot, the one with whom I'm least familiar is Abbas Kiarostami. Persian and Arab friends in college touted his work to me, but I had no means to find it. I can comfortably say that I've been trying to track down Close-Up for the beter part of ten years, based merely on its reputation. That changed the other day when I finally squeezed together some time to fully consume the contents of Criterion's new Blu-ray in one sitting. The events of recent weeks have been surreal and crushing, so escaping halfway across the world was a welcome change of pace.
This is a major eye-opener for Americans who are largely unfamiliar with not only Iranian, but any Middle Eastern filmmaking. This 1990 film focuses on a man who, by mere chance, meets a woman on the bus while he is reading a book. She notes that she has been meaning to read said book, and he tells her that he happens to be the author of the book, one Mohsen Makhmalbaf. This same Makhmalbaf is also a famous Iranian filmmaker. She invites him to meet her family. They are all quite taken by this Makhmalbaf, who tells them that he wishes to make his next film in their house with members of their family as actors. The thing is...this man is, in fact, named Hossein Sabzian, and is no filmmaker.
Kiarostami finds this story fascinating. He comes into play just as the resulting fraud trial is about to go forward. Combining footage shot of actual events (from the jailhouse to the actual trial itself) and fully re-enacted staged with the real-life participants, Kiarostami works cinematic magic. Close-Up is a remarkable precursor to the age of reality TV, in that it combines fiction and non-fiction to stunning effect. It defies classification as mere narrative or documentary. Twenty years later, it still stands apart in questioning what is and isn't phony in the world, with few siblings aside from Orson Welles' delicious F for Fake. The real Makhmalbaf himself appears all of a sudden at one point, and even Kiarostami's editing of the sequence is suspicious (and for good reason, as he explains in the 2009 interview on the disc).
The supplements are overflowing here, even if you don't count The Traveler (1974), Kiarostami's black & white first feature that is about young boys obsessed with soccer and finding themselves. I started off by watching that followed by Close-Up Long Shot, a 1996 documentary that catches up with Hossein Sabzian, Close-Up's main character. I runs almost an hour, and is alternately enlightening and somewhat sad. Especially poignant is Sabzian's declaration that the cinema has saved and also ruined his life. After that, I queued up a 2009 interview that Criterion did with Kiarostami about the film, Sabzian, and his career over the last 20 years. One revelation in particular was quite crushing. The A Walk With Kiarostami documentary is very much just that. It follows the director around while he chats about this and that, from philosophy to filmmaking influences. I've yet to listen to the commentary track done by the double-team of Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum, but I have no reason to think it's any less estimable than other tracks that Rosenbaum has contributed previously. The Godfrey Cheshire essay in the included booklet is, as is always the case with Cheshire, illuminating and informative.
Aspiring filmmakers in particular should see this, but lovers of any cinema anywhere will find the movie itself and the included supplemental material as satisfying as an eight-course feast. I recommend setting aside a few hours so that you can inhale the whole thing. Amazon sells the Blu-ray for $36.49. You can get it from Criterion's Store for almost five bucks less, at $31.96.
Post Script:
Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry has been in The Collection for years and years, and after seeing Close-Up, I regret not seeking out or watching it as of yet. The seven years-younger feature would make an interesting "B movie" in a double feature with this one, now that they're both widely available in the States. Cherry concerns a man driving through Tehran and desperately seeking somebody to save him or bury him.