Before watching this movie, such a comment attracted me:
"Rather than a movie, I'd rather call it a documentary."
Why?
Because two-thirds of the film's plot is about the confrontation between suspects and judges in court.
And the most amazing thing about this movie is that it breaks the line between virtual and real, making you mistakenly think that this is a record of a case that really happened.
The story of the film is indeed taken from real events, but the filming process is not completely real.
The film "Close-up" seems to be shot in a real way, which is called a "documentary-like documentary", but the documentary is a kind of "fake truth".
Let's take a look at the definition of documentary -
"Documentary is a film or television art form that takes real life as the creative material, takes real people and real events as the object of expression, and processes and displays them artistically, with the essence of showing the truth, and using real people to think."
Documentary is a form of art, and art is a falsehood.
Picasso said that art is not truth, art is a lie, but this lie can teach us to know the truth.
What kind of truth does the movie "Close-up" take us to see?
The first time, I didn't understand.
The film was released in Iran in 1990 with a Douban score of 8.8 and directed by Abbas Kiarostami.
Abbas is a legendary Iranian director and the first Iranian film director to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
Abbas was not a director by training, and his career had nothing to do with directing, he drew illustrations, designed posters, and later began shooting short films and commercials, accumulating a wealth of life experience before starting his career as a director.
Abbas is a rare master of world cinema, good at revealing the deepest human emotions from ordinary events, his film style is unique, the language is simple but contains deep ideas. Famous film directors Godard and Kurosawa both admired him, and Kurosawa called Abbas's work "unparalleled".
Representative works include: "Taste of Cherries" (Palme d'Or winner), "Gone with the Wind", "Where is My Friend's Home", "Close-up", "Legal Copy".
Today I want to talk about one of his representative works, "Close-up".
The story of "Close-up" is based on a real incident in Tehran in which a young man was arrested for fraud. The young man pretended to be a famous director to eat and drink in several families, talking about wanting to make a movie, and wanting to raise funds to make a movie through these people, and finally being identified and sent to court.
This is a seemingly simple event, but the director shows an ordinary lower-class mass, a downtrodden group who has lost their jobs and families, through certain suspense editing, confrontations and confessions in the courtroom, to show the inner struggle of the masses and the yearning for the spiritual world.
Unreal and reality find an intersection in this film, and the director the young man wants to play actually appears at the end, and rides a motorcycle with the young man to visit the homes of those who have been deceived by young people, and the young man can't cry at the first sight of the director.
There is excitement, regret, and shame in this tear, I think it is more of a feeling of being saved, the director really became someone's savior at this moment, he came out from behind the scenes of the movie, like the movie he shot, brought the dream of the movie to reality and gave someone the opportunity to fulfill their dream.
It was also through this scene that it really poked my heart, thanks to Abbas's romance for allowing me to witness the magic of the film director in the movie, he is not only the dream maker behind the scenes, but also a dream fulfiller in reality.
When I watched it for the first time, it felt like a very simple story, but after reading Abbas's book "The Taste of Cherries", I recorded some notes about the shooting of "Close-up", and after reading it, and then watching this movie, I felt that every shot was worth playing.
In The Taste of the Cherry, Abbas writes:
"When Close-Up was filming the trial, I planned to use three cameras in a real courtroom. ...... One camera was broken, and the other was so noisy that I had to turn it off. In the end, we had to move the only working camera to another location, which meant missing Sapuzian's footage. So, after only an hour of trial and the judge leaving because he was very busy, we filmed Sabchian behind closed doors for nine hours. Eventually, we recreated most of the trial scene without the judge's presence. ”
I was shocked to realize that most of the long scenes in the courtroom, which seemed to be "live-action shooting", were actually mostly forged by the director.
This kind of scene, which has always been defaulted by the audience to be real shooting, turned out to be one of the biggest lies of the director in this movie!!
It is common in movies to make people feel dreamy and unreal, and even to make people feel the director's powerful landscaping and wonderful ideas, but it is very rare to make people mistakenly think that they are real, and even directly substitute real scenes, and the ability to control this scale is amazing.
In this "fake truth", we see the truth of human nature, which is probably the truth told by the movie "Close-up".
If it weren't for the director's personal narration in the book "A Taste of Cherries", I probably wouldn't have been able to understand the subtlety of this film.