CLOSE UP

Abbas Kiarostami's film "Close Up"isn't a documentary although it deals with incidents that have happened and 'the actors' are the real people involved 'acting out' those events, and it's a masterpiece. The events it depicts concern a Mr Sabzian who introduced himself to an Iranian family as the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, promising to put them in his new film, his arrest for fraud and his subsequent trial. Everything we see happened but what we get is a dramatic 'reconstruction', played out by the participants themselves. It's part of Kiarostami's genius that the 'performances' he gets are superb, particularly from Hossein Sabzian himself, (if this is 'acting' it may be the greatest performance by a non-professional ever). The result is a wonderful love letter to the cinema, to those who love it and, of course, to Sabzian that is both very funny and deeply moving as well as a brilliant deconstruction of the whole movie-making process. (Is the final sequence actually happening as in a real documentary or is it too a reconstruction?). It has just been voted the 42nd greatest film ever made; it's easy to see why.