Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.
Close-Up is one of cinema's most singular achievements. Its plot — a real fraud case in which an impostor pretended to be director Makhmalbaf — becomes a philosophical inquiry into identity, art, and desire, earning a well-above-average rating for its conceptual depth and emotional resonance. The non-professional cast playing themselves occupy a fascinating middle ground: naturalistic and affecting, but uneven enough that Acting lands above average rather than exceptional. Kiarostami's cinematography is restrained and purposeful — handheld intimacy in the courtroom, quiet observational framing elsewhere — solidly above average but not visually dazzling in the way of, say, his later work. Novelty is the film's crown jewel: no film before or since has so seamlessly collapsed the boundary between documentary and fiction, subject and filmmaker, event and reenactment, making it genuinely one-of-a-kind. The ending — the famous, sound-glitching reunion between the impersonator and the real Makhmalbaf, shot in seemingly accidental real-time — is quietly devastating and formally perfect, earning a 4 for its emotional and conceptual payoff.