An entertaining, occasionally incredible and in a lucid way complex film in which appearance and actuality, insanity and reality, documentary and fiction, keep changing places. Central figure is Hossein Sabzian who in the film and in reality has pretended to be film directory Mohsen Makhmalbaf (see also Nun va goldun and Gabbeh). Sabzian is a poor, unemployed film-lover. One day he is sitting in the bus beside a rich woman who sees him for Makhmalbaf because of a misunderstanding. This misunderstanding leads a life of its own and Sabzian ends up in jail as a fraud. When Abbas Kiarostami read this story as a sideline in the newspaper, he stop he was working on and decided to record the trial of Sabzian. In a certain sense, the film is a false Kiarostami and a real Sabzian. Kiarostami: ‘Close-up is the only one of my films that I can see with the spectators in the cinema because the story developed outside myself.’ (GjZ)
