we don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter

reflections on docufiction

Man Marked for Death, Twenty Years Later (Cabra Marcado para Morrer)
1984, dir. Eduardo Coutinho, 119 min.

The title says man, but this movie is about a woman. Elizabeth Teixeira, a peasant leader whose husband was killed at the height of his influence and power by landowners trying to prevent an uprising, changed her name, went into hiding, and left behind all but one of her eleven children just a couple of years after João Pedro’s murder. For twenty years, Coutinho chased the story—first recreating it with everyone but João Pedro, his children and widow playing themselves; then eventually letting time itself tell it. Elizabeth’s face shows up again and again, not just on her own body, but on those of her three daughters, who remember and miss her variably. Coutinho shows up, too, a willful presence from the first to the last, like Elizabeth, hell bent on some kind of justice.

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Crimson Gold
2003, dir. Jafar Panahi, 95 min.

I chafe at my own reading of this movie as “too on the nose” because, well, isn’t life that way, too. But something didn’t quite land, despite the impeccable pacing and the clever structure that prevents the audience from getting ahead of itself. Too much portraiture, maybe, too much reliance on the central character—a pizza delivery driver slowly getting fed up with life in a blatantly unequal Tehran—played by a non-actor (an actual pizza delivery driver) in a performance too opaque to do right by the material. I’d like to revisit it in ten years…

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…like I did with this movie:

Close-Up
1990, dir. Abbas Kiarostami, 94 min.

You’d think trying to figure out the puzzle of what’s real and what’s recreated would be distracting, but it isn’t at all. The story goes like this: a poor, working-class cinephile named Hossain Sabzian impersonates, over the course of a few weeks, the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. In doing so, he ingratiates himself to a middle-class family in Tehran, the paterfamilias of which eventually figures out what Sabzian is doing and calls a reporter, first, and then the cops. Kiarostami catches wind of this and goes to visit Sabzian in jail, filming the encounter, and gets special permission from the judge to film the ensuing fraud trial. Everything that happens from the jail onward is documentary footage; everything before is recreated for the film. Everyone plays themselves. Nothing is presented linearly. Each piece of the story unfolds so slowly that it invites a reflection on the construction of narrative and its fragility. Every variable is visible; so is every possible alternate outcome. How would the judge have behaved had there not been cameras in the courtroom? How would the family have presented themselves had there not been cameras in their living room? How would Sabzian have behaved if he hadn’t gotten, eventually, to meet the object of his impersonation? And so on. A perfect film.

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Taste of Cherry
1997, dir. Abbas Kiarostami, 99 min.

A sad, morose, suicidal man, Badii goes the entire movie searching for someone to bury him and by the end gets what he wants from God, or nature, or the universe, or, maybe, he gets it not at all. We don’t know, and if we’re to take the director’s coda at face value—it doesn’t really matter.