Album Reviews
Movies
Concert Reviews

Top 10
Resources
Contact Us

Documentaries, Part Two.Current documentaries are both telling stories and playing with the genre's more formal aspects, but this is not necessarily a new trend. In fact, Chicago audiences have an amazing opportunity this weekend to see two of the more significant but rarely seen documentaries of the last 20 years. They are directed by the celebrated Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami and are brilliant in both
conception and execution.

Close-Up, which screens at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Saturday and Tuesday, is the more famous of the two. It focuses on a true story in which an unemployed man pretended to be the famous Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. He convinced a well-to-do family to finance and star in an upcoming movie. The man was eventually found out but not before he had spent a great deal of time rehearsing an improvised script with the family's older sons.

The story itself is fascinating, but Kiarostami's documentary adds to the layers of complexity by having each principle character re-enact his part. So you have a man who pretended to be a famous director acting out his deception and in the process helping make a movie, while the family who was at least partially deceived by their desire to be on camera actually find themselves on camera. The judge who presided over the trial makes an appearance as does a reporter who covered the story. Some of the footage is apparently from the actual trial, but it's never clear what was actually recorded and what was re-shot. Furthermore, each person is replaying his role--as he remembers it--while at the same time justifying their actions to the camera.

When I first saw Close-Up, I was impressed but thought Kiarostami was fortunate to stumble on such an extraordinary tale. But when I saw it for the second time this summer, I was blown away by Kiarostami's narrative choices. For clearly he has shaped the material to make his own points about movies and their place in life. What does it mean to be a director of the people? Should cinema align itself with the poor and marginalized? What does it mean to portray reality? And what is truth? All of this comes together in a breathtaking epilogue when the man who played Makhmalbaf gets to meet the actual Makhmalbaf. They ride on a motorcycle through the streets of Tehran (which beautifully echoes the fictional film the man was "making") to the rich family's house. The movie's freeze-frame ending is both stunning and wonderfully moving.

Homework, the other of the two documentaries, plays at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Friday and Sunday. Though not as famous as Close-Up, I find it to be an even more compelling picture. On its surface, it is a deceptively simple film. It's just a series of interviews with 8- and 9-year-old boys about why they do and don't finish their homework. Placing them in front of the camera, usually by themselves but sometimes in pairs, Kiarostami asks them questions like: do you finish your homework, do you like school, why don't you finish your homework, do your parents help you, and which do you like more: cartoons or homework?

This last question would seem to be a no-brainer, but the boys' convoluted answers are fascinating. Often Kiarostami opens the interview with that question, and almost all of the boys pause, look around as if hoping to see the right answer on the wall, and then uncertainly respond, "Homework." Then after a few more questions, usually easy ones about their friends or hobbies, Kiarostami again asks about cartoons and homework; this time around, almost all of the boys gleefully talk about their favorite cartoons, obviously forgetting what they just said.

Kiarostami's focus on how children respond to authority finds its visual equivalent in two ways. Periodically, the camera will cut to a frontal shot of Kiarostami, who seems truly menacing, decked out in dark, imposing
sunglasses and framed from below (adopting the boys' point-of-view) with a bright camera light behind him. It's not surprising that the children would be initially intimidated.

More striking, though, are the repeated shots of children standing outside the school (either before the start of school or during recess). The teachers, never shown on camera, command the children to line up in rows
and then to recite, in unison, various Islamic or national creeds. It's the equivalent of saying the Pledge of Allegiance. The children, though, are much more interested in other things--moving around in line to be next to certain friends, giggling, pushing each other--than about what the teachers are saying. By showing the boys blithely ignoring the teachers' authority, Kiarostami subtly undermines the state's authority as well. The children neither pay attention to nor respect what's handed down--do their parents? should they? In the Iran of 1989 (when the film was made), those sorts of questions would've been genuinely subversive. Kiarostami ups the ante even more when he intentionally cuts out the soundtrack (the voiceover cheekily claims so as not to offend religious sensibilities), and all we see are children . . . being children.

The most powerful theme of Homework, however, is its exploration of the nature of truth: what is truth, why do we lie, is it wrong to lie? As Kiarostami interviews each of the boys, it becomes clear that many of their answers are either outright falsehoods or lame excuses. Sometimes, the boys attempt to shift the blame to other friends, teachers, or their parents. Sometimes, they do the opposite, such as trying to excuse their parents for things they didn't do. This reaches its apex when, late in the film, Kiarostami interviews one of the parents. By that time, we in the audience have become so attuned to the children's lies that we quickly notice the parent's evasion. The father is certainly more skillful than the children at this business of deception, but yet still gives himself away.

By examining the nature of truth at its basic level, Kiarostami forces us to contemplate how that works in our own lives as well (why do we lie? how do we lie?) as well as in the systems of power that surround us. Are our teachers lying when they have us recite different dogmas? How are the media and government twisting the truth (at different times in the film, we hear the state-controlled radio)? How do we teach our children, and what are we really teaching them? And what is the place of movies, and particularly documentaries, in portraying or exploring truth?

The movie's conclusion is an amazing interview with two boys, one with a student we've met before who's very comfortable in front of the camera. The other boy is obviously terrified of Kiarostami. He makes up excuses of why he can't be interviewed, protesting over and over that he has to memorize a passage of the Koran for a class assignment, until finally he flees the room in tears. Coaxing the boy back in, Kiarostami tells him that he can practice his memorization with them. What follows is a spectacular climax that brings all of the film's themes into focus and forces the audience to completely re-examine what we've seen.   

J. Robert Parks 9/11/2002