Close-Up

1990 documentary from Iran

Rating: 16/20

Plot: The story of a gentleman who, after being mistaken for director Mohsen Makhmalbaf on a bus, decides to pretend to be him to gain the trust of a family and access to their home. It gets him into some trouble because it's apparently illegal to impersonate famous film directors.

Unusual stylistic hodgepodge here. It's a semi-documentary. Director Kiarostami's line between fact
and fiction is a fuzzy one. On the one hand, you get footage from the actual trial. It might even be too much of the actual trial. The details get a little repetitive and border on the minutia. On the other hand, you get reenactments of some of the interactions with the fraudulent Sabzian and the Ahankhah (spelled backward: Hahknaha) family including their initial meeting on the bus and several mundane conversations in their home. And who better to get for the reenactments than the actual participants themselves. The whole thing just seems odd to me, but it makes for a multi-layered documentary about film, celebrity, pride, and an assortment of other things. I know nothing about Abbas Kiarostami other than his parents maybe named him after a crappy band, but judging from this, I'd guess he's the intellectually playful type. There's a scene early in this where a taxi driver is standing around waiting. The camera doesn't follow the police into the house where an arrest takes place. No, it stays with the taxi driver. At one point, he kicks a canister and it rolls, seemingly forever, down the street. The camera follows it and follows it and follows it. Later, when the news reporter who took the taxi with the police officers (it struck me as funny that the police arrested the guy and they all drove away in the cab) is going door-to-door in search of a tape recorder to borrow, he sees the canister and gives it a healthy kick. Does it mean anything? I don't know. But it's the kind of detail I like in my movies. Special credit needs to go to the "actors" in this, especially Sabzian. I've heard it's difficult playing yourself, yet those reenactments looked like they could have been documentary footage. This isn't everybody's cup of tea, but for some, it would be an interesting and rewarding experience.