A journalist (Hossain Farazmand) is in Tehran taking a taxi to a middle class district of the city, accompanied by two soldiers. He is chasing up a new story about a fraudster, Hossain Sabzian (as himself) who inviegled his way into a home there by pretending to be the film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, but his reasons are something the reporter is determined to find out for himself. Along the way he chats with the taxi driver (Hooshang Shamaei) and learns he is an ex-pilot who is now firmly back down to earth, no matter that he would still like to be in the clouds...
This film isn't about the taxi driver, but the idea of wanting to be someone you're not is one which makes up a layer of director Abbas Kiarostami's combination of dramatic re-enactment and documentary thanks to his techniques where he took recreated footage of Hossain's trial and then persuaded him and the people involved in the case to act out what had happened. After Errol Morris made such an impact with The Thin Blue Line many documentarians picked up the re-enactment ball and ran with it - nowadays no television factual reportage will be without them, for example, but Kiarostami pushed the concept to extremes, eventually forcing events to merge with the filmmaking.
Although proclaimed as a masterpiece by many, for others it's a troubling work, and leads you to ponder how much Hossein was being exploited in not quite the same manner he was exploiting the Ahankhah family he fooled. He was a big movie fan and to live out his dreams as one of hs favourite directors would appear to be the impetus for his crime, as if he couldn't face the misery of his actual life and preferred to indulge himself as someone else, and the family, also big movie buffs, were flattered enough to welcome him into their circle for a while, even giving him money and showing him around their home, which they later believed was his attempt to work out what he could burgle from them.
To his credit, Hossein seems to have only wanted to play out his fantasy, although the fact he took a fair amount of money from the Ahankhahs doesn't paint him as quite the harmless eccentric that you think Kiarostami would like to have us consider. The courtroom scenes, filmed apparently at the accused's request though you imagine the director was keen to secure the footage himself, fill in the background and help us understand what led this increasingly forlorn man to do what he did, but the feeling that perhaps he should not have been encouraged for the sake of making a movie about him is never far away, and going as far as Kiarostami did, essentially making this man a movie star, appears to be feeding his delusions.
If you want to go deeper, this brings up all sorts of ethical questions about the act of filming someone for your own purposes, in this case making money out of him, increasing your standing in the art world, and perhaps, somewhere down the line, convincing yourself that you are in some way helping out by bringing his story to a wider audience. Close-Up, or Nema-ye Nazdik as it was known in Iran, is generally thought of by its adherents as a moving and tender work, but if you start to consider the implications of what the director was up to it actually becomes an uncomfortable experience. You may find Hossein an irritation at some stages, more a figure of pity later on, but by placing him at the centre of a movie which like it or not glorifies his misjudgements and justifies his behaviour puts serious implications on Kiarostami and methods which make things less clear instead of more so. It's true that when the shamed and contrite subject meets his idol at the end it's a moving sequence, but you may feel guilty for being part of this story in the vital observer role.
