• Close-Up

6/19/22 (Sun)

Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami based his 1990 maybe-it-was-maybe-it-wasn’t documentary on a true case in which an unemployed man managed to enter the lives of an upper-middle-class family by impersonating a famous film director. The setup recalls the stage show Six Degrees of Separation, where a black man claiming to be the son of Sidney Poitier puts one over on a wealthy white family – in fact, both shows oddly appeared in the same year. The latter, also based loosely on a true story, was a satiric jab at upper class pretensions in an artsy New York household, with a racial dimension to boot. Close-Up goes a step beyond that in using the actual people involved in the case in a semi-real, semi-staged format. Moreover, the focus is on the poor rather than the rich as the young man uses his deceit in an attempt to find dignity in his life.

I wasn’t sure what was real or not in many cases; I have to assume that the court scene was the actual trial, for instance, but the main actor’s beautifully expressed testimony seems too smooth and literate to be true. He is actually asked point black if he is acting given that the camera is rolling, i.e., just as he portrayed a director for the family, perhaps he is portraying someone other than himself in the docket. Still, he seems utterly sincere, leaving the question hanging. Later the director whose identity he had assumed appears in person to greet him after his release from prison, bringing him to tears, and furthermore takes him to the family’s home and asks them to forgive him. The line between real and unreal is very slender throughout.

I’m impressed that the victimized family was willing to reenact the embarrassing scenes with the fraudster. The director opens the film with the documentary maker entering the house with the police and bringing the man out in cuffs, while later adeptly showing the entire process from the inside of the house. In neither case did the players seem like they were acting, and the camera had the feel of a handheld device following them around spontaneously (other than some clips edited in later).

The man explains calmly and convincingly that he felt worthy in his guise as a “director” in a way that he never felt as a poor man, knowing that the family would never have taken notice of him had they realized who he really was. The film takes a while to get going, but the sincerity of all involved won me over in the end. I’m not sure if I would put it on my greatest-films-of-all-time list as some have, but it’s a unique and interesting piece to be sure.