The Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami has been a critical and film festival darling for the past few decades (and to whom Jean-Luc Godard once remarked, "Film starts with Griffith and ends with Kiarostami"), and so it is with some happy coincidence to be introduced to the him through two films that have some startling similar subject matter. It's hard to tell if this is by accident or if this a running theme in the director's work: how people construct a new reality for themselves, or that it's who they really are, or what happens to them and to the people around them. In a few words: the forgery of self and art.
The two films are 'Certified Copy' which is still playing in theaters (though about to leave soon) and 'Close-Up', which finally became available in the US on DVD and Blu-Ray via Criterion Collection a few months ago. The former is his latest film, and the latter is from 1990 and one of the director's most revered features.
- CLOSE-UP (1990)
In this story, which is obstensibly based on actual events (or, perhaps, the actual events happening before the audience's eyes, which is the case in large part), a poor Iranian man Ali "Hosain" Sabizan impersonates a famous director, Mahsan Makhmalbaf, to edge his way into a rich family's life and steal a few thousand dollars from them. He is caught and put on trial and director Kiarostami, 'appearing' as himself, to shoot the trial. While this is met with some resistance at first- mostly by the justice superiors not understanding why there would be such interest in a simple fraud case - but it doesn't take long to see why the director has interest in it: the man Ali Sabizan is a fascinating, small sort of man who is honest about what he did that was so wrong, yet doesn't make bones about why he did it. He needed the money, he knew Mahsan's films so well and about moviemaking (from reading books he says), and promised a possible part for the family in his next film.
Perhaps it was from seeing films recently such as Catfish that had such a way about them that made it unclear as to what was totally real or a put-on, but Close-Up's curiousity does come out of not being certain if this is a documentary or not. Like Herzog's non-fiction films, Close-Up posits itself as the real thing at first, a documentary of these events, but then does other things to muck around with this, like reenacting a scene like Ali approaching the woman of the family on a bus and going on very sincerely and dead-pan like about being the director he puports to be. But instead the film becomes a fascinating portrait of a man who desires so much to be something he isn't that it makes him do something that he really wouldn't do under other circumstances.... or maybe he would do it again?
Kiarostami shoots things without any flash in the style, just a simple camera set-up will do in the courtroom ala Court-TV as Ali is on trial and the family makes their case: they know Ali is not an evil man, but he was deceitful and knew what he was doing was wrong. Ali does too, but makes his case not for his innocence but on the nature of forgery. It's hard to tell if he is totally sincere, but Kiarostami keeps the second guessing by precisely not messing with the audience. it's up to the people watching, in court or in a theater or at home, what is "real".
By the point of the trial is is all over for him, and the director he impersonated is also interviewed on camera about the crime. What is a movie really? How does one construct a reality that can be believed if life itself becomes theater? They are interesting questions. The only drawback is that the film may be too short on such a subject (albeit there was only so much trial, and there is only so much time to watch Ali squrim and try to talk in circles, which is dead real). But those re-created scenes are striking in their naturalism and how no one, certainly not the family reenacting the events, is exactly an "actor" but all are the same.
...And speaking of a recreated reality and a 'house of mirrors':
- CERTIFIED COPY (2010)
Building upon ideas from that 1990 feature, Kiarostami, in his first feature film outside of Iran (and with a heavyweight Academy Award winner Juliette Binoche and Opera singer William Shimmel, one major actor and one a non-professional film actor), Certified Copy screws with the mind like for what should be no effect at all. Yet the filmmaking is strong and precise, shots lasting for great lengths (minutes really) but never is attention lost for these characters, who start out as something and by the end are something entirely different. Or maybe they were what they said the whole time. It's hard not to take the film personally in some respect since every audience member will have a varied reaction. The arguments for those who meet things half-way are never less than engrossing.
Obstensibly the film has two characters, one James Miller is an author of a book on art forgery and about what is a 'copy' or 'original' in an artistic work, the other is a single(?) mother, Elle, who comes to see James speak at a book presentation. They agree to meet very soon after to talk about art and the what is a copy or not (Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol come up quite a bit), and she leads him to a Tuscan village where they walk around and talk and eat at fine restaurants. It has a Before Sunrise feel to it, of two intelligent people talking and fretting about certain matters, and it feels pleasant and cinematographically interesting (at one point as Elle drives with James she gets upset at a 'crazy' woman in the street, but Kiarostami doesn't cut outside of the POV inside the car, so we don't see what this is until she fully drives past the scene - things in the background are a consistent theme here).
... And then something happens midway through; at a restaurant as James and Elle have an argument about something that James may have seen, a woman and a boy (who may have been Elle and her son? she cries, that's most what can be seen), and an older woman talks to Elle about the two of them as if they're married. As 'if'. Hmm. So for the rest of the film James and Elle 'become' married, and there is bickering. Plenty of it; there is the uncomfortable sensation that, perhaps, Kiarostami is messing with the audience's heads as to one of two (or maybe three) things: 1) they were strangers from the start but become so absorbed into these married personas the previous reality isn't brought back around till near the very end when a train engagement is brought back up; 2) they were married all along and the early scenes are part of the 'game' of acting to cover up how their marriage has deteriorated (an allusion to Rossellini's Voyage in Italy?); 3) it's *both* of these, that they are strangers AND a bitter married couple who argue over bad wine and broken feelings.
Kiarostami has fun with it, with whatever reality can be conjured, and it may frustrate to the point of throwing it away. It's a challenge that is worth talking for the adventurous moviegoer since it tackles the subject it posits: art and its creation, filling roles and an alterate reality, the nature of a "copy" and how the audience perceives it. A conversation in the car about Warhol and Jasper Johns goes into something more interesting: it's not simply that because it's a 'Jasper' or 'Warhol' that people see it differently, it's that it's someone's wife and then the person sees it differently through him or her. There is confusion in the second half, things feel disconnected, but there's rarely the feeling of not being in the hands of a director who doesn't know what he is doing. It's a juggling act that might make Banksy proud.
As for the acting, it's stellar. Kiarostami films the faces of Binoche and Shimell as if they are looking at the audience as they also look at each other (there's even a very brief breaking-the-4th-wall moment when it looks like Binoche is looking at the audience and waving but it's "really" just people outside the window having a celebration, ho-ho). Binoche is definitely a good actress, and pretty, while Shimmel has that smart attractiveness that makes him interesting even when his character whines and puffs away on his own self-arrogance... if it is that, anyway. Binoche, too, has fun with being so dramatic in some scenes- and she's so deep and moving in such moments of tenderness it's almost easy to forget it could just all be a put-on- and especially one moment as she puts on lipstick and earrings, very carefully, like, say, an actress preparing to go on stage.
The camerawork also contributes to this feeling of wonderful uncertainty as shots have mirror qualities - in a parlor where the immediate aftermath of a new marriage is taking place and the married couple is in a reflection, and maybe a minor reflection inside of that one - and the lighting in some key indoor scenes is done with such elegance and taste. Even Jean-Claude Carriere, writer of Luis Bunuel's later films(!), shows up in one key scene to offer James some advice. It's interesting to note here the fact that Kiarostami is Iranian - a simple movement of a hand on a shoulder speaks a thousand words.
Certified Copy, like its brother film Close-Up, is about cinema as much as it is about life, about role-changing and the struggle to live in decency and morally while in flipped-over roles. One is more clear-cut about the 'facts', yet neither is exaclty more interesting than the other. They make for a captivating double-feature, so to speak, if one is up for the challenge of "art-house" moviegoing.
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