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