VividSimon Simply Perfect

Lawbolisted Powerful

Robert Joyner The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

sharky_55 A Moment of Innocence, or The Bread and the Flower Pot, closely recalls fellow Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up, which also sough to recapture real life with its own dramatic conviction. In his own retelling of the story of a politically charged attempt to disarm and take a policeman's gun in his youth, Mohsen Makhmalbaf has created something so unique and so layered that it at first baffles the mind. Makhmalbaf wields the camera with an intent to retell faithfully and truthfully, in true Cinéma vérité style - his stylistic choices represent a documentary that cannot tell lies, and yet it becomes increasingly unreliable. In once scene, he converses with the young actor who will play him in the car in long take, talking about everything from future ambitions to romantic crushes, and it puts on a mask of genuineness. They approach his cousin's household to ask if her daughter will play a part in the film. As the girl goes to serve tea to the young actor, she suddenly whispers to him as if he has Mohsen himself, and they are planning the events that will lead to the fateful stabbing. It has suddenly becomes a moment of artifice without any stylistic or directorial indication. Another technique that Makhmalbaf plays with is one that Kiarostami also used in his 1999 film, The Wind Will Carry Us. While the camera films in wide shot and the characters walk further and further away, the sound levels do not adjust accordingly and realistically, but remain in our ears, as if they were right here next to us. Such a technique throws our objectivity up into the air; surely this must have been dubbed later? And near the end of the film Makhmalbaf will slowly add a musical soundtrack to dramatise the climatic encounter, and replace the still long takes with more dynamic follow shots and closeups. One thing that remains abundantly clear however is the amateur nature of the young actors.This tension is what makes the film tick. You see, both Makhmalbaf and the policeman seem to have entirely different accounts of what happened 20 years ago, and slowly they begin to realise this as they are in the process of recapturing those events. The policeman wants a tall, handsome young actor to portray him, and sulks when he does not get his way. He vigorously coaches the kid on how to properly play himself, and freely interrupts the filming process to criticise and adjust (and Makhmalbaf also freely layers perspectives of the camera onto each other). And yet, the artifice does shine through. Twice, the policeman storms off, the second after that tumultuous discovery that the 20 years of longing for the girl had been all for nothing, a lie to keep him awake. Makhmalbaf does not attempt to document these emotions in closeup, yet he is also eager to use the soundtrack to imitate the reaction. And he does not relent when he has the actors right in front of him; the policeman feigning suicidal thoughts after the discovery, and the young Mohsen breaking into tears and refusing to commit the violence of the past.This becomes the key to that breathtaking final freeze frame. Makhmalbaf seeks to recreate the truth, but has become aware of the impossibility of filming an objective, unbiased version of the past. That politically charged activist youth is no more, and the post-revolution mindset becomes clear in the young actor's ideals of saving mankind, but not through violence. And in the young policeman, who does not want to wield the gun to shoot, even if both are just artificial constructs. So they instead offer the bread and the flower pot, a symbolic blossoming of the new generation, and a testament to the ability of film to be able to reconcile and transform the reality of these weary old men.

Artimidor Federkiel As if fellow Iranian director Kiarostami's exemplary intertwining of fact and fiction of a Makhmalbaf real-life story in "Close-Up" weren't enough, Makhmalbaf himself ups the ante of creative filmmaking a few years later: Focus is a moment in his young idealistic life where he stabbed a guard during the Iranian revolution, resulting in several years of jail time for him before he eventually emerged as one of the leading Iranian filmmakers. But it's not just an autobiographical detail he wants to shed light on, Makhmalbaf films a documentary on top of a pseudo-documentary (or is it the other way round?), it's a heavily symbolic re-interpretation of what happened, why and how, a look into an aspect of reality. In the process a transcendence of the actual situation ensues with an almost mythical truth buried in the film's final scene. Makhmalbaf accomplishes the feat by re-enacting said moment with no other than the actual stabbed guard (now out of money), who coaches a young actor to play himself - while the former guard is being filmed by the director doing so. Simultaneously to that Makhmalbaf casts actors meant to portray his own perspective of the events, not without revealing insights, and the whole effort culminates in the filming of that crucial stabbing scene: Welcome to a film in a film, a reality in a reality, a blending of fact and fiction in a most fruitful and enlightening way, social, historical and political commentary included. How much of what ended up on screen was actually planned, is for the viewer to decide, but if you're looking for creative minds Makhmalbaf's use of the medium will keep you enthralled throughout."Excuse me, what time is it?" we hear Makhmalbaf's accomplice ask the guard at the end of the film, the air pregnant with suspenseful anticipation of what is going to happen. So, what time is it? It's two decades after the original incident and an Iranian filmmaker has just delivered his masterpiece. And when the moment arrives the picture freezes, saving a moment in time for eternity that could only happen on film. But in a way, it's all real.

Gloede_The_Saint When the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf was 17 he stabbed a policeman, now that policeman has come to him to ask for an acting job. The work begins to reconstruct the actual incident and they both work on picking their younger selves. However the actors who are to play them are almost identical in their personality.In many ways it's comparable to the style of Jean-Luc Godard. It sets up absurd situations and plays with reality, even within the films own reality. The film is indeed an odd mix. It's basically about it's own creation. And some parts, as the actual incident happened in real life. Though many elements are played for laughs and could be classified as a comedy it separates from Godard in one major point. Instead of having sarcasm under it's surface we will her find humanity and suffering.In full it's a look at Irans culture and the old and the new generations view of violence and what it takes to be good. It's artistic style helps to enhance not only the absurdity but also the isolation that can be found in this society. A film about progress and memories that is sure to evoke emotions.

dave-593 The Iranian cinema is perhaps the most self-reflexive of all national cinemas. Though it owes much to the development of Italian neo-realism, the Iranian cinema today is not just an extension of its predecessor's concerns about cinematic truth but a formal inquiry of the nature of cinema and the "truth" that lies within and outside of art. Jacques Rivette's groundbreaking "L'amour fou" already sets the stage in 1968 when he investigated the symbiotic relationship betwen art and life by using two different film stocks, 16 and 35 mm., to represent "reality" as it unfolds in front and behind the camera respectively.In Moshen Makhmalbaf's 1996 masterpiece "A Moment of Innocence" twenty years separates a key moment in time and the recreation of it. The incident occurred when Makhmalbaf was only a youth who participated in an anti-Shah demonstration which led to the stabbing of a policeman and his imprisonment for the next five years. In an attempt to recapture this moment Makhmalbaf decides to a make a film within a film casting all the original participants (including the policeman) to play themselves as mentors to their younger selves, (i.e., actors) guiding and instructing them in the making of this "fictional" documentary.It is not surprising that non-professional actors are employed here to both maintain a semblance of reality and to keep cinematic distortion at bay. But paradoxically, the young non-professional actors chosen to play Makhmalbaf and the policeman of their youth are as similar as they are dissimilar from their counterparts, thus, setting the stage for exploring the many tensions that exist between past and present, art and life, cinema and reality. This type of casting not only blurs the line between fiction and reality but also the distinction between documentary and narrative filmmaking.The preoccupation with the phenomenological aspects of the cinema is as much the focus of this work as is the dramatization of the event leading up to the pivotal moment, then and now, reconstructed as a memory film as well as a product of the filmmaker's imagination to help correct an incident that only becomes clear to everyone involved after twenty years have elapsed. This celebrated moment which occurs at the end of film effectively captures the past by placing it in the present context much as if past and present suddenly converge and share the same space and time, thereby allowing us to see loss and recovery unfold simultaneously. That lost moment is now regained twenty years later through art's ability to heal and transform Makhmalbaf and his crew--thus altering the "reality" of life. The final shot is both life-affirming and referential because it so eloquently evokes the cinema's first prominent use of the freeze frame in Truffaut's "400 Blows"--if only to remind us just how far the cinema has come along. Like Truffaut's autobiographical based character Antoine Doinel the cinema has indeed grown up.