- Cesar Millan ("The Dog Whisperer")
I once read a news article some years ago where a conman defrauded a bunch of little old ladies through a fake investment scheme. I do not exactly remember the details, but it involved giving the conman their credit card information, with which he would make "investments". One little old lady was quoted to reveal how she saw items like "Betfair" on her bill, but assumed it had to do with a travel company, and never thought to question it at all. I was terribly sympathetic, of course - there are few things more iniquitous than the taking advantage of the age and naivete of old people - but, equally, I was also a little incredulous. Surely "Betfair" should have rung some alarm bells, like, from the word "bet"?? As con schemes go, this is hardly the most elaborate.
In any case. Abbas Kiarostami's Close-up details a similar and apparently true story: a man, Hossein Sabzian, deceives the Ahankhah family by passing himself off as the famous film director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, requests and receives money from them, eats their food, spends a night at their house and inundates them with false promises that he would shoot his next film in their house. Again, I felt myself reacting with the same incredulity: if a man whom you randomly sit next to on a public bus turns to you and says he is a famous and somewhat reclusive film director, would you, without more, really, truly believe him? And that revelation accompanied quite soon after with a request for money? Yet, that is exactly what happened in this true story of Close-up. The family had expressed their concern to appear in Kiarostami's film because they were afraid they would come across as sounding gullible, but that, I'm afraid, is exactly what they come across as, to me, at least. Or perhaps I should be less cynical and more trusting of people.
The theme of deception is writ large in the film - not only does the plot revolve around a story of fraud, but the techniques of Kiarostami which he uses to make the film are also games of trickery. For example, he films Sabzian's trial apparently in real-time, yet inserts his own questions and footage of the judge listening intently so it appears as if Kiarostami himself is participating in the trial as cross-examiner and inquisitor, a role which did not actually happen. At the end of the film, the sound mike attached to the real Mohsen Makhmalbaf as he goes to greet Sabzian apparently gives out, so we only hear fragments of their conversation, but this, again, is only a trick; the mike really works perfectly well (Kiarostami's artistic judgment of fading the sound in and out was, apparently, due to his opinion that the conversation between Makhmalbaf and Sabzian "was not particularly interesting"). The familiar questions of cinematic reality, the duplicities of Rashomon-esque perspectives, the truth relations of the image blah blah, needless to say, arise. But I'm interested today not by the deception, but by the belief. The scheme of the con, after all, is simple: trick a person into trusting the conman with his/her credit card details. But the scheme of the belief, it seems to me, is not that simple. Why, how, could one not question an "investment" called "Betfair"?
And here, I suppose, is where the human mind and nature shades into its most vulnerable (via which I should confess I have before fallen out of pocket myself, principally through a villainous mechanism called The Stock Market). Not only because of the obvious - because we can be weak, ignorant, naive, impulsive and greedy - but also because we can extrapolate from the past and we can dream of the future. We (and this is not a statement of judgment in any way) are not like dogs, which, according to the amazing and marvellous Dog Whisperer, Cesar Millan, live only in the present. And there is a lot of past for us to regret and rue, and a lot of future for us to hope for and fantasise about. The depiction of the Ahankhah family is underscored by their dreams of and hopes for a better future. Times are hard in Iran - the two sons are engineers, recently graduated from university, but are unable to find jobs because the factories are not hiring. The younger son, Mehrdad, out of his own personal inclinations and love for the arts (it was stated very early on in the film that he is interested in art, cinema and literature) as well as perhaps his desires to rise above the abjection of his joblessness and dismal employment prospects, in particular takes to Sabzian - what better way to transcend one's despondent circumstances than to rub off onto one some of the shine and glamour of a famous, successful film director, no matter that he appears to have simply dropped out of the sky onto your doorstep? The deceiver is also a vehicle of his own deception: Sabzian is desperately poor and his life is unhappy - he is divorced, he works "on and off" at a printer's, he has only one of his children while the other is with his ex-wife, he lives in a "godforsaken" place. He, too, fantasises about being a creator of art which can transcend his suffering - what better way than to impersonate a famous, successful film director, no matter that the scheme is threadbare, that he seems to know about, even court, its inevitable end (at one point, he talks about how the Akhankhar family leaves a magazine lying around the house, bearing the real Makhmalbaf's photograph, yet he continues to return to the Akhankhar house, even though he is already aware of the family's suspicions)?
According to the wonderful and marvellous Cesar Millan (of whom I have recently become a fan, which is why I am mentioning him so often), dogs have no sense of time. They do not remember what happened in the past, which is why it is, apparently, meaningless for human owners to pet a dog or give it a biscuit to try and "make up" for, say, shouting at the dog fifteen minutes ago, because dogs simply do not remember. Not because, I think, they do not have memories - I'm sure dogs have great memories - but because they apparently simply do not live in the past or in the future. They live only in the now. Unfortunately, that is not the case with us.
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