F For Fake

Made in 1974, and his last completed film, Orson Welles' F For Fake is the sign-off from a master. In control of the viewer from the first frame to the last, Welles as self-confessed "charlatan" weaves together a tale of fakery, forgery and film-making. A re-edited documentary about "the greatest art forger of the twentieth century" Elmyr de Hory turns into an interrogation of his 'outer', the author of of a fake biography of Howard Hughes Clifford Irving which turns into a history of Hughes and a history of Welles himself and a connection with a girl, a girl who set up a grand fake, a fake that is possibly fake. A fake fake.

F For Fake is alive with the lightness of touch of the French New Wave, the playfulness, the knowingness, the lack of seriousness and the conviction that "in a sense, each story is a sort of lie". It also features what's been called "the most profound moment in cinema history", a rumination on artistic signatures set amongst the mist swirling around the unclaimed Chartres cathedral:



Of course Welles is the perfect narrator of this story within a story within a story... As he himself owns up to (the whole truth?), he has a history of fakery himself, beginning in Ireland, at the age of 16 when he managed to convince members of a repertory theatre in Dublin that he was in fact a famous American actor. Of course he was soon to become just that, by way of one of the great hoaxes of the twentieth century, never mind Elmyr! Welles's great War of the Worlds broadcast of 1938 that sent thousands into mass hysteria. Or did it? Uncertainty is everywhere in this film, round every corner, in every frame, in every utterance. It would be good to remember that hall of mirrors sequence from The Lady From Shanghai. It might do you some good.

It says something about Welles' genius that he can laugh raucously at the absurdity of the rabbit hole of confusion and forgery surrounding Elmyr, Irving and himself one minute and compose the Chartres ode the next. Perhaps they're not that different. Perhaps that's the real sign of genius, the realisation that life, as a friend of mine once said, is "far to serious to be taken seriously".

Metropolitan

I saw Whit Stillman's Metropolitan last night. Described as a "great afternoon film" by my friend Al, it is simply a great film. Not great in the grand scheme of things perhaps, but great nonetheless.



The tone is perfect. It manages to balance the arch dialogue ("I'm a committed Socialist yes but not a Marxist. I prefer the socialist model developed by the 19th century socialist critic Fourier") and intentionally mannered acting with a wonderful deftness. It helps that there is a constant stream of funny one-liners ("playing strip poker with an exhibitionist somehow takes the challenge out of it"), largely delivered by Chris Eigeman's Nick Smith. It has a consistency to it, the lines don't sound contrived even though they are.

It is like a cross between Woody Allen's films and JD Salinger's short stories. Metropolitan is as quintessentially New York as both Allen and Salinger, the characters in this film as firmly rooted in the Big Apple as Alvy Singer or Zooey Glass. It's part of the film's allure, that it presents us with this classic image of New York, New York at Christmas, New York's rich young things, great parties, balls, debutantes. It's a cinematic box of expensive chocolates; a wilful ignorance of the "real" New York that no-one wants to see and gives us our dream New York, the city we all want to be rich and young in.

I Don't Want To Sleep Alone

One of the trailers before Paranoid Park was this from Tsai Ming Liang.

I'd never heard of him before I saw this, but from the first second I was captivated. It looks absolutely like nothing I've seen before.

Work and Non-Work

The other day I put into practice that theory (is it really a theory?) of continuing to write even when you know it's shit. I think it worked out pretty well, but it will obviously need retouching. It'll probably change completely by the time we film it. I'd be worried if it didn't, to be honest. A script is never a completed film.

Nevertheless, all that success was mitigated by my failure to upload the scene to our Partnerpage, thus preventing me from working on it for the next week. Which is highly frustrating.

Still, it's given me something to write about on here.

And I'm going to see Paranoid Park later.

Could be worse.

Children of Solidarnosc

Lack of work on my part this week. Mainly due to overwork at the day job and volunteering at the Document Human Rights Film Festival at the CCA.

I did projection of two films tonight! One called Beslan: The Right To Live, which was a rather muddled film about the aftermath of the terrorist takeover of a school in the town of Beslan in southern Russia, and a fantastic film called Children of Solidarnosc.

The latter was a wonderfully assured, confident, incisive, thought-provoking (I could go on) piece following the children of leaders of the Solidarity movement in Poland. It was a cross sectional view of modern Poland. It talked to a young teacher whose father wrote a wonderfully tender song for her when she was one, explaining why her dad was away all the time and how he hoped to bring about a better world for his little girl. The song became an anthem for the workers but had less impact at home, and she admits feeling bitterness towards her father. In a discussion round the dinner table she talks of the struggles for her generation in a capitalist society. Her parents are a little sceptical, listing the freedoms young people now enjoy. She finds life just as hard she says. At home she and her boyfriend bone up on Ireland whilst packing their possessions into boxes. They plan to live and work there for a few years in an attempt to save up money. "This is our last chance before we have children," they say.

We also met Lukasz, a media analyst in Warsaw who heads home every two weeks to his mother's farm and his 8 brothers and sisters. He worries about what will happen to the farm and his mother, and seems to find the balance between his two lives a hard one to achieve. He says people are leaving Poland and he himself went to the US and England, but "this is where my life is".

Artur, meanwhile, has met a girl named Ana and they are busy planning and building (!!!) their house. He works in the same shipyards his father did and whilst he seems a cheery fellow he moans at the unfair ratio of responsibility to salary.

All of the young people in this film share the problems most young people in the West have. Jobs, money, family, the usual stuff. What sets them apart is the acute realisation they all have that it could've been different, and was for their parents. The one problem they have that Westerners don't is to reconcile the legacy of communism and their parents part in its downfall with their new lives.