By Abbas Kiarostami, the director of Where is the friend's house, this one is considerably different, less immediately enjoyable and more experimental, but definitely profound. As with that former film, all of the performers are non-professionals, the difference being that they are playing themselves. In fact, stretches of the film are straightforward documentary, mostly of back and forth between a (very reasonable and tolerant) judge, the defendant, and witnesses. The only acting is done in flashbacks, portraying events referred to in the course of the testimony.
The film opens with a reporter in the front seat of a taxi, with two soldiers in the rear, excitedly describing to the driver how he has stumbled across the case that will make his reputation. The taxi driver, who is an ex-pilot, listens tolerantly, even though he's never heard of the film director involved (doesn't have time to see films)
nor of the famous reporters the reporter wants to emulate. Turns out the story is one of impersonation. The family to whose house they are driving has invited in a man claiming to be Iranian auteur Mohsen Makhmalbaf, but that they had realized was not. They hadn't revealed to him that they knew, so the reporter would be surprising him. When they find the house, at the end of a dead-end street (behind some rather grand gates),
first the reporter goes in, then he sends the patriarch out to get the soldiers, and then they emerge with the impostor, and all except the reporter pile into the taxi to go to the police station. The reporter cannot go along because he realizes he needs a tape recorder and frantically searches from house to house to find one. Then the opening credits roll.
After the credits, it is weeks later, the reporter's article has appeared in a magazine and come to the attention of Kiarostami, who comes to the jail to interview the impostor, a man called Hossein Sabzian. He later gets permission to film the trial from a rather bemused official (who thinks there are much more exciting trials to film). It transpires that the whole thing started when a member of the Ahankhah family (in the reenactment it is the mother, but I think it was really the daughter - perhaps she was too shy to act in the reenactment) sat next to Hossein on a bus and noticed that he was reading the screenplay for Makhmalbaf's film The Cyclist. She initiated a conversation with him because she was also a cineaste, asking where he got the screenplay from. He offers to give it to her and sign it because "I wrote it." From there matters escalate, until Hossein is a regular visitor because he has the son and daughter convinced that they are to be actors in his new production, and he has them rehearsing. When the family work out that he is not who he says he is (when the son congratulates him for The Cyclist winning a prize at a film festival, something reported in the paper, but of which he is clearly unaware), they begin to suspect that his constant entreaties to come and see one of his films at a cinema that is not the nearest one showing it are a ploy to lure everyone out of the house so it can be burgled by his accomplices. Hossein is most indignant when this suspicion is raised in the courtroom, so the judge tries to winkle out of him his true motivation for the subterfuge.
And the truth is poignant: he is a poor man, to whom nobody listens, but when he becomes Makhmalbaf the family eagerly listens to him. They give him money, yes, but that is beside the point. Furthermore he has a vision of his life as an artistic one, and he becomes part of the world of movies that he loves so deeply.
The trial as a whole is surprisingly moving. The judge is genuinely curious as to Hossein's motivations, but also a calming presence, repeatedly reminding Hossein when he gets indignant about the theory about him casing the Ahankhah household that he is not accused of that, only of fraud. He soothes the ruffled feathers of the family and more-or-less talks them into forgiving Hossein (not that the mother needed much encouragement). It's a vision of a gentler justice system than we're used to, and certainly than we expect from the stereotypes of Iran. (And it's a real legal court, not a religious court. In fact, religion seems to play very little role in either of the Kiarostami films we've seen so far.) The cherry on top is that Kiarostami arranges for the real Makhmalbaf to meet up with Hossein, something that moves him so much that he collapses sobbing into the director's arms, who touchingly consoles him. He asks him which he prefers being "Sabzian or Makhmalbaf?" to which Hossein just says "I was tired of being me." Then they both hop on to the director's motorbike as the film cameras follow at a respectful distance, capturing their conversation - but only intermittently. We don't know if this was just an unplanned equipment failure or some metacommentary, revealing the artificiality of the whole affair. But they pick up a flowering plant along the way
and wind up at the Ahankhah family home, where Hossein, sobbing again, gets to apologize, and the family finally get to meet the real director (although I don't know if he agreed to have them in his next film). Strange, experimental and, while it look like it cost approximately $100 total to film, very thought-provoking and moving. Apparently Iranian cinema (in marked contrast with, say, Nigerian or Indian cinema) is the cinema of the quotidian. The Mirror was not an outlier, it turns out. Now we have to track down The Cyclist...
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