F for Fake Reviews

Part essay, part apologia, part prank, Orson Welles's F FOR FAKE, one of the most inventive and invigorating nonfiction features ever made, is about the artist as con man and the con man as artist. Welles's two primary fonts of inspiration were the muse of melancholy and the muse of mischief, and in F FOR FAKE he invoked the latter muse more zestfully than in any other film of his career. "I'm a charlatan," acknowledges Welles at the beginning of F FOR FAKE, and "this is a film about trickery and fraud--about lies." After pledging that everything we will see in the next 60 minutes is true, Welles introduces us to Elmyr de Hory, a brilliant forger of artworks, and Clifford Irving, the author of Fake!, a biography of de Hory. Next, in a "Candid Camera"-style aside, the beautiful Oja Kodar is shown walking down a busy street in a sexy little summer dress as male passersby react with awe and delight. Welles proceeds to delve deeper into the sagas of de Hory and Irving, underlining the irony of Irving, the biographer of an art forger, going on to perpetrate one of the most notorious publishing forgeries of the century: the fake "authorized biography" of Howard Hughes. Our host then touches on his own connections with Hughes and on his own history of deceit: At 16, stranded in Dublin, Welles wangled an acting job by pretending to be a Broadway star; his radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds panicked thousands of citizens who thought Mars was really invading America; he had long been recognized as an accomplished stage magician. Welles then narrates the following tale, which he describes as a "reenactment" of a "true story". In his later years, Pablo Picasso, living in the town of Toussaint, is struck by the beauty of the vacationing Kodar and paints 22 pictures of her. In payment for modeling she gets to keep the canvasses on the condition that she neither sell nor exhibit them. Later, Picasso reads of an unauthorized exhibition of his work in Paris and decides to investigate. At the exhibition the artist finds Kodar and 22 bogus "Picassos." Kodar explains that she showed the genuine paintings to her dying grandfather, a talented art forger, who used them as inspiration for painting the fakes on exhibit and then burned the originals. End of story. Welles confesses that the Picasso yarn he has just told us is pure fiction and reminds us that the 60 minutes of authenticity he initially promised us had expired some time ago. He then concludes his film with some final thoughts on life, death, and art. In the early 1970s, French filmmaker Francois Reichenbach made a short documentary about de Hory for the BBC. Welles acquired the footage and began reshaping it into a longer film of his own. Midway in the project, the Hughes-Irving scandal broke, inspiring Welles to widen his sights and allot Irving a more important role in the film. He rounded off the work with relevant autobiographical material plus the apocryphal tale about Picasso. After a year of editing, F FOR FAKE opened to excellent reviews (Francois Truffaut later included it on his list of the ten best American movies of the 1970s) but its poor performance at the box office disappointed its creator, who had become enamored of the film's essay-like tone and collage structure and had hoped to make more movies in this mode. A decade after completing the film, Welles performed a little flip-flop that ties right in with the theme of the movie. "In F FOR FAKE I said I was a charlatan and didn't mean it," he confessed, "because I didn't want to sound superior to Elmyr, so I emphasized that I was a magician and called it a charlatan, which isn't the same thing." Welles was indeed a magician, a great one, and one of the wonders of this scavenger movie is the wizardry of its editing--dynamic, intricate, playful, endlessly resourceful but never ostentatious, confusing, or wearying like other quick-cut exercises. Editing is the art of connections, and Welles was a master of connections and associations. The many fascinating links made in F FOR FAKE continue outside the film proper; for example: Reichenbach had once filmed a short portrait of Welles; Welles at one time had begun work on a movie (unfinished) to be called "It's All True," his slyly misleading claim about F FOR FAKE; and so on. At the beginning of F FOR FAKE, Welles, the prestidigitator, changes a little boy's key into a coin and back again, then warns us that the key is "not symbolic of anything. This is not that kind of movie." Although he gave the world "Rosebud", the greatest symbol in cinema history, Welles was too great an artist to lean heavily on the crutch of symbolism. If there is a meaningful emblem in F FOR FAKE it's the round beaming face of that boy, who strongly resembles Welles, reprised at the movie's close. It represents mischief, surprise, curiosity, delight--the precious and (perhaps even by Welles himself) undervalued lighter side of Orson that he foregrounded in this, his final completed film, and that comprised so much of his genius. As Welles biographer David Thomson put it, F FOR FAKE "reaches the child in all of us and confirms the unmediated boy in its maker." (Nudity.)