It's 1993. Bahman has failed seven subjects, and his father, Abbas Kiarostami, is furious: "A child's duty is to study" (though getting good grades isn't incidental). He blames Bahman's failure on the four days he spent shooting his own film, but both of them know that's not the real reason; he failed the previous year too.
Kiarostami tries to shame his son by appealing to his own moral framework: that Bahman provides no value to society—a leech, eating, drinking, smoking, doing nothing. Not only does Bahman not share this worldview, he knows there's no practical need for him to study. "I certainly won't have money troubles." Bahman reveals a limit of his father's moral framework. It's a response his father has no answer to.
At this point, Kiarostami’s only recourse is to lash out and hope that time will prove him right. Unable to understand his son, he positions the "objective" camera facing Bahman, but the parent-child quarrel (and Bahman's humiliation) has already taken place before filming begins. What he records is not the conflict itself, but its aftermath, intended as future evidence of his son’s mistake, "like in the film Close-Up," as he puts it.
Nine years later, nothing has changed. Contrary to his father's prediction, Bahman has not ended up in the gutter, nor does he feel ashamed of his youthful "mistakes." Instead, he decides to continue this very film, insultingly pleased with his work.
Kiarostami, aware of his loss and unhappy to have become material for his son's film, delivers the final blow: "All your values are anti-values. You can't see properly. That's why you pointed the camera at yourself again; otherwise you would have pointed it at me, not yourself." He interprets a formal cinematic decision as moral failure, reading the camera’s orientation as evidence of his son's inability to see the world correctly, and, by extension, as a failure as a filmmaker.
By now, both know that time is in Bahman's favour. Hence the last cut to ten years later, ending with an ellipsis. If the future belongs to Bahman, then so does the past, as the film opens with a clip from Kiarostami's Homework (1989), in which he interviews schoolchildren about homework. By opening with footage from his father's film, Bahman reverses their original relationship: what was once Abbas's account of his son becomes Bahman's account of his father.