Indie Movie Review: ‘F for Fake’

The popular myth surrounding the final years of Orson Welles’ career has the director rotting away in isolation, totally incompetent and unproductive.

The truth is that Welles was churning out films (most of them rather good) until the final years of his life. Yes, there were unfortunate missteps: his infamous involvement in a television ad for frozen peas and his voicing a planet eating robot in an animated children’s film. And although it is hard to forgive the man who directed “Citizen Kane” for stooping so low, it should be done, for these projects often provided a majority of the funding for the last few of Welles’ films, including the landmark “Chimes at Midnight”, and what is generally considered to be his last great finished film, “F for Fake.”

“F for Fake” (1975) resides in an alluring grey area: not quite documentary, not quite narrative (filmmaker and Welles historian Peter Bogdanovich described it as an “essay film”). “F for Fake” has Welles leading an investigation into the world of art forgery and fakery of all kinds. The film’s main subject is Elmyr de Hory, one of the century’s most notorious art forgers. Picasso, Modigliani, Cézanne; Elmyr de Hory has copied them all (and made quite a profit off of them as well). But the man had never been “officially” caught in the act, until Welles and his film crew start digging through the forger’s long and storied career.

What starts off as a straightforward look into art world forgery quickly spins off into a varied and complex history of the basic act of lying. About a quarter of the way through “F for Fake,” Welles gleefully steers the roller coaster right off the tracks and never lets up speed.

Welles carries us through the labyrinth with theatrical flourish, looming over the camera with that Shakespearean grandeur that made him famous, and, of course, there is that voice (if a recording existed of this man reading the phone book, I would listen to it). So no matter how lost we might get during the film, Welles is always there making sure we’re at least having a grand ol’ time. Welles has all his hats on with this one: actor, director, writer and editor. You can argue all day about the validity of the auteur theory, but “F for Fake” is without a doubt, a film by Orson Welles.

“F for Fake” begins with a solemn promise from its director: “For the next hour,” Welles declares, “everything you hear from us is really true and based on solid fact.” One needs only to remember the filmmaker’s longstanding romance with charlatanism to realize that the claim is dubious at best. Welles was, after all, the man who convinced America that Martians had landed Halloween night, 1938. And there lies, perhaps, the film’s main attraction: it’s a film about a faker by one of the world’s most celebrated fakers.

Posted by Joe Cornelison on Oct 6 2011. Filed under Leisure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.