F for Fake aka ?: About Fakes
I really thought I knew what to expect from this movie, it having sat in the background kinda waiting to be watched for years. Turns out, it’s a lot more focussed – a lot more, well, documentary like – than I expected. I thought it was a much more general look at all the word “fake” implies, particularly in the realm of cinematic trickery. Instead, it’s a look at two infamous fakers – one, Elmyr, a faker of art; the other, the guy who wrote the hoax autobiography of Howard Hughes. Of course, the documentary itself turns out to be an exercise in that which it studies and, ultimately, practically negates itself.
What it amounts to, I just realised, sort of reminds me of A Cock and Bull Story – it’s kind of a great giddy wild goose chase that ultimately amounts to nothing … yet what fun it is along the way. The scenes with Orson Welles make you imagine how wonderful it would be just to be at dinner with him or something, that enormous personality, so enormous it somehow gets away with being actually pretty damn annoying at times, lol (just the way he says things like, “A man in [Argentina?] tried to re-enact [the War of the Worlds radio show] a few years later. He want to jail. I didn’t go to jail – I went to Hollywood,” makes one feel like a child on a grandparent’s knee or something, lol).
All in all, it’s not quite the masterpiece of trickery I expected from Welles – but it is an incredibly fun and cheeky little ride I’ll certainly sit down to again.