Saturday, December 16, 2017

F for Fake (1974)

It makes sense to me that the last movie to be directed by Orson Welles would be quite different. Not just from his other works but from pretty much any other. Some reviewers have reservations about calling it a documentary, tho I don't know how else to classify it unless "essay" counts as a genre.

The project had begun as a doc on Elmyr de Hory, possibly the world's most successful art forger. (Of course, a more successful one might never get caught.) It still focuses on him in large part, but Welles expanded it to liars in general, including Clifford Irving, phony biographer of both de Hory and Howard Hughes; Oja Kodar, Croatian actress and muse of sorts; and...Welles himself.

You probably know that Welles gained fame by fooling a lot of listeners to The War of the Worlds. I did not know that he got his first stage role as a teen by lying about experience, back when it was harder to check these things. This leads to probably his best line in FfF: "I started at the top and have been working my way down ever since." (There's a reason he had to use a European company.) At various points, we see him performing magic tricks -- not particularly innovative ones, but I couldn't tell you how they work. So yeah, I guess he was the best choice for making and narrating the film.

Most of it is fairly enjoyable. I feel less certain about the third act, which seems slower, more fancifully artsy, less informative, and less decent (Kodar goes topless).

More importantly, I have mixed feelings about the whole treatment of fakers. They may be masterful at fooling us, but are we supposed to celebrate them for it? It's one thing to entertain us as magicians do and another to commit crimes that carry a prison sentence.

Maybe that's the point: to get us in touch with our own contradictory opinions of the art of deceit. Just look at how people react to "trolls" nowadays. We usually mean the term in a bad way, but sometimes we laugh at their victories. That's basically what I did for Welles.

Overall, I'm glad he ended on this note. It's not his best work, but it is the kind of reflection you can't really follow up on.

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