Close-Up: Written, Edited, and Directed by Abbas Kiarostami 1990; 98 minutes

How strange that my best story should take place on a dead end.

Farazmand, a reporter for a Tehran magazine, noting the incongruity of pairing an exceptional story with a dead end, offers the comment early in the film as he arrives at the Ahankhahs' house. While Farazmand is the journalist who broke this story, Close-Up is directed by the iconic Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Like Farazmand's observation, Close-Up is devoid of formulaic congruity and is not easy to summarize or explain.

Ostensibly, Close-Up is the story of an underemployed cinephile named Hossain Sabzian, who passes himself off as Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the acclaimed Iranian director. The film's cinema verité quality is pronounced, as it chronicles actual events and features all major characters played by their real-life counterparts. Many scenes, however, are reenactments, which pull Close-Up beyond documentary into the realm of fiction. This boundary-blurring foundation affords Close-Up a unique structure to explore themes of longing, envy, idealization, sorrow, and anguish, all of which are attuned to the absence of expressive opportunities.

Upon closer examination, I amend here, as Kiarostami appears to assert, that expressivity is closer to a human necessity. Perhaps a compromise is warranted, and we can say it is a necessity that there are too few opportunities for. Such a compromise brings us closer to the nature of Sabzian's existential suffering. Notably, the film has remained significant for audiences and critics since its 1990 debut and, in 2022, was ranked 17th in the Sight & Sound poll of the greatest films.

A brief encounter on a Tehran city bus between Sabzian and Mrs.

Ahankhahs initiates the film's events. Observing that Sabzian is reading the screenplay of Makhmalbaf's The Cyclist, Mrs. Ahankhahs asks where she might purchase a copy. In response, Sabzian impulsively claims that he wrote it, insinuating that he