Review of F for Fake (1973) by Ben W — 14 Jul 2005

The 1970's, a time of awakening, introspection, and the realization that everything surrounding us warranted questioning and deconstruction, spawned in film a true masterpiece - [i]F for Fake[/i].

Orson Welles, whose own stupendous girth - unable to be properly handled or toned down though the 'smoke and mirrors' fakery of cinematography - threatened to make a mockery of a film designed to intricately weave an intricate web of fakery about fakery...as one does not typically assume a man of Welles' pronounced 'stature,' -- who, in the movie flaunts nonchalantly the ordering of [i]un grand steak au pouvre[/i] immediately [i]apres[/i] the consumation of a giant half ton lobster -- to delicately handle the subject of forgery by example.

However, with this film does he not only succeed, but moreover, Welles succeeds in making clumsy fat fools of us all on many levels during the course of its viewing. Huffing and puffing up the Ibizian hillsides in flowing magician garb with magnum cigar [i]am bocca[/i], Welles draws us into a film that, should you choose to adjust your viewing ever so slighly in another direction, can turn out to be a film about something completely different. References to Welles' own career and personal life abound in scenes in which the subject matter remain markedly different -- the burning of canvases by Elmyr (the art forger Welles follows throughout the film) harkens us back to the embers of "Rosebud," not to mention Welles' inclusion of his own personal career as a kind of ingenious 'scam' on the level of Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving (see 1970's Howard Hughes biography debacle). Moreover, Welles further woos us into the deep dark world of forgery and tricks, not through the ridiculousness of his appearance, but through the summer sweet succulence of his voice.

His voice, along with the imagery which at times never made sense -- still frames resulting from motion with continued dialogue, images within images, single soirees created from clips taken from many -- seemed to meld together in a coherence that one would never expect should each part be unraveled and experienced seperately. The marvels of Welles' relevantly 'learned' thespian narrative and time tested vocal talents, saves this film from falling from its already precipitous vantage point over the deep dark chasm of pretentious auteurism.

However, should [i]F for Fake[/i] be modeled after a baroque fugue of faking fakers, then perhaps it is a fake one -- or perhaps one orchestrated by Welles in the Stokowskian sense -- true to the original, but fraudulent in its new environment. Certain aspects of Welles' vision seem to distract from the logical methods by which each scene and its dialogue intertwine -- thereby causing breaks in the film by which one is rudely awaken from the trance it tries so hard to throw its viewers into. Welles seems to get too antsy sometimes, and certain scenes seem thrown in so that he could rewatch the film and chortle with delight at the awesomeness of his own genius -- while to the rest of us, these scenes can be jarring -- making one begin to realize that the film should actually be boring.

At one point in the film, Welles verbally salivates with glee over the word 'pretentious,' and indeed this word can in fact be used to describe something about this film, and in fact the entire career of Orson Welles -- though the film itself cannot truly be labeled as a 'pretentous' excursion. Welles is, deservedly so, a master of what someone sees and believes -- we the viewers are merely a key component of his savage experiment. To Welles, we are imbeciles who think we see what we see, and know exactly what we know -- when in fact, much like the art experts who remain invaluable to the very art forgers they are hoping to distinguish from, we too are [i]told[/i] what to see and what to determine. [i]F for Fake [/i]is, more than what it may pretend to be superficially, a commentary on how easily 'educated' society can be duped into a particular system of belief -- and that truth 'truly' remains an exculsively [i]human[/i] invention.