On DVD: Criterion, Close-Up Brilliantly Take Us Back to the (Iranian) New Wave

Every New Wave must go the way of all flesh eventually, and it does seem as though the Iranian New Wave has faded into history. Don't tell me you missed it. A prickly, pressurized cataract of neo-realist film wisdom that more or less began for most of us in the early '90s with the festival appearances of Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up, the Iranian wave may have been the most significant national breakout movement since Godard bounced his day job. A product if anything was of the country's Islamic revolution, the films (by Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Bahman Ghobadi, Jafar Panahi, etc.) weren't stylish tubthumpers but patient and elliptical puzzles, humane but challenging, machine-pressed by the Sharia strictures on society and media into a kind of whole-grain eloquence.

Today, Kiarostami's experiments are getting more and more rarefied, Panahi was just released from prison on thought-crime charges, and Makhmalbaf is expatriated to Paris. (Ghobadi, whose surreptitiously filmed No One Knows About Persian Cats saw U.S. theaters earlier this year, still trucks along in characteristic form.) If the moment has passed -- and there was a time not long ago when we saw 10 or more Iranian films released in the States in a given year -- the films remain, and Close-Up (1990), in a new, smokin' Criterion edition, may be the zeitgeist's signature statement. This must-see artichoke is simple yet inexhaustible, a head-scratcher that takes as its business the very question of what movies are. At the same time, Kiarostami's meta-movie mysteries never obscure his deep, aching concern for people.

It's not a documentary, except when it is. Or vice-versa. It begins, though not for us, with a civil court case brought against one Hossein Sabzian, an out-of-work Iranian man who, posing as controversial director-celebrity Makhmalbaf, had insinuated himself into an upper-class Teherani family's life under the pretense of using them in a film. He doesn't, of course, but in a kind of proto-reality-show sleight-of-hand, Kiarostami does: Entire segments of Sabzian's strange little history with the family are reenacted for the camera, and we're never clear exactly how much of what we see is true and how much is fiction.

Indeed, there are no ends of the spectrum here, just the spectrum. Kiarostami is right there in the courtroom, which seems authentically "real," but that means little as the filmmaker begins meddling with the action and shaping Sabzian's fate. Everybody is "acting" -- even Sabzian, who seems, since it's not his movie anymore, the only character in view to have never read the script. Of course, eventually Makhmalbaf himself enters the reenactment fray, as himself. The hall of mirrors is deep, but they all reflect, humanely, on both Sabzian and his prey's intoxication with movie-world fame and respect.

In one way, you could read what Kiarostami does here as a kind of cinematic comeuppance -- persuading everyone to relive their humiliations in exactly the manner they so foolishly craved to begin with, on film for real. But although the filmmaker makes no explicit statement, it's clear his perspective hums with affection and empathy. Like nearly every other Kiarostami film, Close-Up takes questions about movies and makes them feel like questions of life, death and meaning. Saying it's a film that requires several viewings is only saying it's worth whatever time and dollars you spend on it.

The Criterion package is buttressed by, among other things, the best kind of supplements: more movies, namely Kiarostami's first feature The Traveler (1974), a vital precursor to the New Wave and a glimpse of what Iranian film was like before the fall of the Shah.