Kiarostami's Close-Up Line Blur

Kiarostami’s Nema-ye Nazdik, or Close-Up, is a 1990 film that bends the traditional documentary line. It tells the story of a man who impersonated a famous Iranian director for a few weeks, and the trial thereafter. Kiarostami uses flashbacks enacted by the people who lived them to help enrich the story told throughout the courtroom. The use of flashbacks in a documentary, especially re-enacted by the subjects, blurs the line between fact and fiction. It becomes hard to tell what happened when or if it was merely the direction of Kiarostami. There are similarities not in style but in impact to Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line. The Thin Blue Line was one of the first to pioneer the use of re-enactments, and it also helped change the life of its main subject. Through Morris’s film, a man was set free from prison, and through the help of Kiarostami, another man is saved from prison. Kiarostami even helps the man meet his idol, and essentially stages the last scene of his film. I think he uses this method effectively, we even see him in part of the film, but he keeps it very bare bones which I think made it seem a bit more boring than it should have. It is an interesting story with a main character who you really start to feel for, but the filmmaking style and the lack of music make it dryer than it should be, and I found it hard to focus. There is one shot toward the end when Sabzian and Makhmalbaf are riding on the motorcycle together and the sun is facing them that I thought was just beautiful and said so much without saying anything. That was probably the best part for me, just because it was so lovely.