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Close Up

2002, Movie, R, 84 mins

Close Up: Review

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In his puzzling, Kafka-esque think-piece, writer-director Przemyslaw Reut excoriates the media for abandoning the truth when it gets in the way of a good story. Foreign-born filmmaker Stefan van der Berg (Michael Mauro) has a chance encounter with fast-talking Joey Capuletto (Steffen Laurence) that he and his film school classmates, Mark Levy (James Cummings) and Arthur Gerry (Peter Carlson), soon regret. Posing as a Manhattan-based movie producer, Joey sends Stefan and his crew to photograph criminal activity in a cinema-verite style. Joey’s motive for hiring Stefan is never specified, but to the shock of the independent moviemakers, they're soon not just shooting (footage) but being shot at! After the gangsters kill a client, they gun down eyewitnesses Mark and Arthur. Stefan gets away, and Joey subsequently gets his just desserts (along with some innocent bystanders) in a tavern massacre. Because Stefan survived the earlier gangland shooting and witnesses mistakenly finger him as the trigger man in the bar room shootings, the police pin all nine killings on him. According to their fanciful theory, fall-guy Stefan masterminded the murder spree in order to make a snuff film he could sell abroad. While the cops build their case and stop looking for other suspects, Stefan falls under the spell of shifty attorney Joseph Kline (Eric Leffler), who capitalizes on Stefan’s predicament, serving less as a mouthpiece than as an agent. He even releases a pulp comic called "The 16mm Killer." As the publicity frenzy builds, authorities fire questions at Stefan in order to coerce a confession: If Stefan would just admit his guilt, everyone would get what he or she wants — except Stefan. Reut's subject, the manufacture of criminal celebrity, was better handled in the notorious MAN BITES DOG (1992). Reut hammers home his biases and fails to evokes either pity for his protagonist or sympathy for his own bombast. leave a comment --Robert Pardi
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