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AMERICAN
CINEMA PAPERS
2008
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CANDID
CAMERAS – VENICE 2008 UNGUARDED
MOMENTS by Harlan Kennedy Truth and untruth. Real life
and reel life. Actuality has always
been a moving target in the movies, but nevermore than at this year’s Where does the truth lie? When
and where do lies, perhaps, tell the truth?
It almost seemed the year to invent a new prize. Never mind the Golden Lion – “The 2008 Golden Lying award goes to…”
Roar of crowd; stamp of
feet; advance to stage of winning director. And
presentation of the bauble – perhaps a gilded lily, or a lipsticked pig, or the figurine of some chronic fibber
from myth or history – to the creator of the Venice Festival’s best film
about mendacity. The camera never lies, they say. But what about the people in front of
it? In the age of reality entertainment on TV, when we live with the question
of whether it is reality (or indeed entertainment), the moving-picture
culture is moving in as never before on the riddles of truth. There are
spoofs of BIG BROTHER-style shows (LIVE!). There are faux documentaries. There are big-budget A little masterpiece called JAY, from the Where to begin? Should we start with the impudent assertion that the
Philippine director Francis Xavier Pasion, making
his first feature, has understood everything that Kiarostami,
that revered master who got a career Golden Lion this year, has failed to
understand? SHIRIN
would be a fascinating experiment if the audience was an authentic one, in an
authentic theatre, unconscious of having its responses filmed. But Kiarostami blows it by employing actresses – famous
Iranian actresses and a single French one (Juliette
Binoche) – to play the ‘unaware’ movie gogglers. Instead of being ambushed in spontaneity,
caught for real in a force-field of unguarded emotions by a hidden camera, a
hundred-plus professional make-believers design each moment of their
adventitious oohs and aahs
and sighs and gasps. Now it could be that this is Kiarostami’s
riposte to reality TV. Perhaps he is saying, “We all act when we pretend not
to, especially when we know or suspect a camera is on us.” Ergo, why not get
actors to do the job anyway? Answer: because it is uninteresting. Actors are valuable for what they
give us after signing, with each project, an unwritten pact understood by
both the performer and the spectator. We know they are pretending. They know
we know they are pretending. With that agreed, we
accept their counterfeit emotions as designer-real and are happy to surrender
to the power of those emotions if powerfully simulated. What we don’t buy is any suggestion that actors can be caught
unawares, or can be a convincing or compelling impersonator or surrogate –
except in comedy or mockumentary (SPINAL TAP,
TV’s THE OFFICE)
– for the helpless Everyman or even the helpless celebrity caught in flagrante verismo. So let’s look at JAY. This begins as a reality TV show or its likeness. We seem to be
watching one of those news magazines in which reporters are sent out to
capture grief, joy, anger or despair “as it happens.” A mother watching a
newscast with her family learns that her schoolteacher son has been brutally
killed in an apparent gay sex crime. Their outpouring of tears and anguish is
witnessed by the camera. We are viewing it, with voice-over commentary, as if
part of the completed TV package. For ten or so minutes the film runs like an
unmediated, sonorous news item, much like the ‘March of Time’ sequence early
in CITIZEN KANE. Then, with a sudden break in rhythm and chronology, we rewind to the
‘real’ reality – or for the film the one-step-back fiction – of the day the
young newshound, Jay, and his cameraman stepped from their van and entered
the lives of the family about to be struck by tragedy. Jay, who has the same
name as the murdered son (or soon tells the family he does), herds the mother
and kids in front of the telly, having planned with his TV station the exact
timing of the newsbreak of the son’s killing. He records them watching in
horror. He gets his cameraman to scoop it all up: the shock, weeping,
hysteria, even the delayed realisation of, and bursting anger at, the news
team’s voyeur cruelty. But Team Jay stays on to pursue and expand its story. Telling the mum
and kids he not only has the same name as their son but bats for the same
team – he’s gay! – Jay sinks a shaft deep into their suckerdom.
With a vague but fulfillable pledge to find the
dead boy’s killer, helped by the tsunami of publicity the family’s
cooperation will enable, he persuades them to spill every truth about their
ex-son. The skeletons duly tumble from the closet, from the porno mags in the boy’s own closet – “Can we break open this
lock?” wheedles Jay Meanwhile every re-enactment of emotional crisis that the TV show needs is provided by Mama. “Let’s do it once more,”
coaxes Jay after she has twice opened the floodgates of her tear-ducts, and banshee’d her cries and moans, over her boy’s coffin. We
come to realise that, more vividly and believably than in Pasolini’s
THEOREM,
where Terence Stamp’s seduction of each member of a family seemed just that –
part of a theorem – Jay really is schmoozing quasi-sexually these casualties
of grief who are becoming coquettes and conquests of media duplicity. Francis Xavier Pasion’s film establishes
another truth, or uncovers another wisdom. As soon as a camera is trained on someone,
anywhere in the world, he or she starts telling a story. The act of filming
or taping inaugurates a narrative. The person in front of the camera is
conscious, even to a small degree, of impacting the potential viewer’s
emotions or intelligence, so he/she starts shaping the arc of those
responses. That is why JAY is a profound study of shallowness, while JAY uses actors
too. It is not a documentary but a film about documentary – and the lies with
which documentary sometimes manufactures ‘truth.’ But as writer and director,
and as a former TV scenarist with a background in
soap opera (!), Pasion understands the processes of
manipulation and mendacity. He also understands the ways these can lead to a
kind of mad The family in JAY really does invent anew its emotional history, or so enhances that
history that it becomes something high-definition and radiant, something more
communicable to the viewing cosmos. They take the shapeless debris of grief
and, with Jay’s help, form it into a narrative, a pop tragic epic. None of
this mitigates the lies and bad faith of the TV crew. (Though perhaps the
capture of the killer, promised and kept, goes some way to doing so). What it
does create is a movie in which reality TV and its mysteries prove a zodiac
larger than we thought, its interlocking orbits of fiction and reality
subtler than we expected, and certainly at times funnier, and even, in a
frightening way, more beautiful. COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS. WITH THANKS TO THE
AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA. ©HARLAN
KENNEDY. All rights reserved |
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