It has been a while, since I watched a movie that I felt like blogging about.
It doesn't happen to me often, that I say out loud: "Wat een toffe film!" ( What an awesome movie! ), while watching one. It happened today, thrice, with Close-Up, a 1990 production from Iran.
And here's the cool thing, it can be watched on YouTube (
you'll find the link, if you read on ).
Don't worry about the quality (320p), the audio is alright and the story and performances are so strong that you soon forget that you're actually watching a movie, let alone be bothered about the low resolution. In fact, if that's the only thing you can think of complaining about, you should just make sure you buy this movie and get yourself a good quality version. Vale a pena / It's worth it.
It was my brother, who recommended this film to me a couple days back. I had heard about it in the past ( probably back in the days when I was studying film ) but I couldn't remember having seen it.
Half a life later, I've finally seen what I would call an unforgettable movie. A little master piece, unforgettable ( for me ) for a number of reasons - a major one would be that it's a movie about film making and not in the way you would expect.
In my reviews, I tend to not talk about the plot of a film and I am not gonna do it here. Not to tease you, but because I believe the film is even better if you don't know exactly what it's about. This was exactly the case when I started watching this movie today and that made it even more intriguing a watch.
Close-Up has this awesome realistic vibe to it that reminds me of Italian neo-realist movies of the 1950s as well as the 1970s films by john Cassavetes and the work by British filmmakers like Ken Loach. It's a beautiful mix of realism and fiction. You're not sure whether you're watching a documentary or not and in the end it doesn't really matter.
It's a captivating story that brought me close to tears, several times.
So, if you have an hour and a half to spare and are up for some international, realist, non-action cinema, you know what to do. Give it a watch:
P.S. After I finished watching Close-Up, I checked out the work of its director Abbos Kiarostami and discovered that he got into film fairly late ( around 30 ) and only started to win prices in his late 40s. The peak of his career took place between his 50th and 70th.
Being 38 year old myself and taking a film making break for the time being - focusing on writing and health, - this kind of stories ( not just the movie Close-Up, but also the story of its director ) give me hope and make me feel like I might, one day, seriously delve into the world of film making once again, that I'm definitely not too old.
And the same goes for you. You're never too old to follow your passion.
In all honesty, we can only regret all the things that we didn't do, looking back on our lives when we're 'really' old, if we're lucky enough to get old at all.
Above this post you see a screenshot of the page delegated to Close-Up on Letterboxd. The latter is the place where I log the films that I watch. If you like lists and browsing through movie history, here's a link to my personal page on Letterboxd, where I logged 3343 movies so far. I'm sure I've seen many more though but human memory...