Shades of Caruso

BFI LFF 2010 – Self Made / Tabloid

2009 was the first year I attended the London Film Festival — despite having lived in the capital for ten years – and the experience was so enjoyable the concentrated cinematic download instantly became my new secular Christmas. 2010 has been a less than ideal year for many reasons, the most trivial of which being the disappointing summer season, which has traditionally been a highpoint for me. This year the sting was removed: knowing I would be seeing far superior (and, as it turned out, inferior) movies in the first few weeks of October made the torment of enduring Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D almost bearable.

I won’t lie: part of it is the glamour — or should I say “glamour” – of seeing and/or meeting filmmakers and celebrities, though the resolutely dismal setting does tend to make the experience a lot more humble. It’s one thing to see tiny Michelle Williams in the flesh – a vision of indie-movie chic in her Erdem dress at the first screening of Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine – and another to cringe at the thought of her forced to eschew the comfort of the West End Vue cinema lobby due to a torrent of water pouring from a burst pipe in the ceiling, and thus ending up posing in a cramped alley outside, the sound of the paparazzi cameras drowned out by the noise of renovation work on the knackered old building next door. If she had ever wondered what the diametric opposite of La Croisette was, now she knows. (Imagine this alley half obstructed with bright blue panels.)

Nevertheless, for an amateur blogger / professional starfucker who has yet to be jaded by encounters with the creative people I admire, there is still a frisson of delight when your experience of watching a movie is enhanced by a quick introduction by Darren Aronofsky and an appearance by Mila Kunis and the impossibly cool Vincent Cassel, though I’m sure my enjoyment of Black Swan was down to the quality of the film (spoiler alert: it’s phenomenal). As I intend to make attendance of the LFF an annual thing (as long as I’m living in the UK, of course), I’m sure the novelty will wear off, but for now, please forgive me if I get annoyingly breathless recounting these little moments.

Luckily the festival started promisingly with Gillian Wearing’s debut movie Self Made, an almost uncategorisable experimental piece in which seven volunteers participate in a method-acting workshop that takes on a therapeutic aspect. Judging from comments made by acting coach Sam Rumbelow after the screening, there was never the intention of providing therapeutic help to the participants as learning the Method is not meant to double as therapy, but it seems to have been an inevitable by-product of the project, especially as Wearing selected the seven volunteers on the basis of the life stories they had described to her when applying to take part. As the film progresses we get an insight into the histories of these people, see what has shaped them. Uncomfortable truths are exposed, traumatic experiences unearthed, and in some cases a kind of catharsis is reached by addressing these psychic wounds via role-playing, method-acting exercises, and performances in small filmed scenes that force the participants to face the problems that are causing them so much pain.

It’s a description that makes the movie sound dry, but Wearing is more of a showman than you might think. She consciously plays with the audience’s expectations, melding the reality of the participant’s lives with the fictitious acting challenges, casting her subjects in “roles” that play with what we have previously discovered about them. She even manages to throw in one of the best shock-jump moments I’ve seen in years, superior to anything in Paranormal Activity 2 – a perversely funny directorial decision she can be proud of. She is also unafraid to show some almost unbearable scenes of revelation: scenes featuring participant Ash Akhtar are so raw it’s hard to watch. (Disclaimer: I know Ash via Twitter – and now real life – so it was always going to be tough to see him in such a vulnerable state, but I doubt that anyone watching the film will fail to be moved by his devastating scenes.)

It’s been said before that fiction gets closer to the truth of things than non-fiction, and Self Made shows Wearing playing with that idea. It’s possible she was inspired by Godard’s comment that ”Every film is a documentary of its actors”. She makes her participants recreate moments from their past, finding out more about them through this process, and then making them act out situations that mirror the events that have filled them with dread for the future. Lian Stewart, a young woman who is saddened by the absence of her father, plays out the role of Cordelia in King Lear, and consciously rejects a father figure. James Baron, a young man whose past was marred by bullying, acts out his own death at the hands of a group of “youths” (to use the emotive phrase employed by the Right-Wing press to demonise young people). Ash… well, that would be telling, and could likely ruin the startling opening scene.

What makes Wearing’s movie so fascinating is how these fictional scenes are informed by our understanding of who these people are, and the empathic knowledge that acting out these scenes is affecting the participants on an emotional level. It says much about the nature of acting, how we perceive the act of performing, and the nature of celebrity, in the sense that we often experience stories performed by people whose private lives are known to us, while also understanding that there’s a good chance those stories are unreal as well. We have to mentally shuffle through levels of emotional expectation when watching stories performed by actors, and Wearing cleverly makes us aware of that thought-process by providing a new perspective on the audience/performer line. It sounds like the sort of meta-commentary lampooned so brilliantly in the recent episode of Community (Messianic Myths and Ancient Peoples), but it’s less self-conscious than that, and just as satisfying as any Charlie Kaufman thought-experiment. And Variety was right: Ash Akhtar should consider chasing this alternate career. ::fistbump::

While it’s hard to know whether to categorise Self Made as a documentary or a “reality” film, Errol Morris’ new film Tabloid is most definitely a documentary that follows his traditional themes of the shifting nature of truth and fiction, and would make an excellent companion-piece to Wearing’s experiment. Tabloid is much jauntier than his previous triumphs The Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line, but similarly focuses on (arguably) unreliable narrators. The stakes seem lower this time: though the tale of Joyce McKinney was once the centre of a tabloid storm in the UK, Morris smartly uses McKinney’s natural showmanship and good humour to crowdpleasing effect which was absent in those gloomy documentaries. The tale of the abduction and seduction of her Mormon lover begins weirdly and Morris beautifully edits the multiple testimonies for maximum audience pleasure: the reaction at our screening was delightfully raucous.

What’s most astonishing about the tale – at least for me – was that it happened during my lifetime, but entering the cinema I remembered nothing about it. Yes, I was a kid and can’t be expected to recall all of the things that happened in the 70s that didn’t involve Steven Spielberg or George Lucas, but as events progress you see that the story of the Manacled Mormon was pretty much inescapable for about a year, with market-leading tabloids the Mirror and the Express running constant updates on her exploits. That light and breezy tone hides a seriousness of purpose: Morris provides a useful insight into the fleeting “importance” of these sensational stories, as well as reminding us of the unscrupulousness of journalists chasing the scoop that will render their competitors’ exclusives mundane.

It’s not exactly a startling revelation that the furore surrounding Cat Bin Lady, or John Terry’s extra-marital exploits, or Gamu Nhengu’s visa troubles, will eventually amount to nothing more than a trivial distraction (though not for those involved, obviously), but just as experiencing the accelerated churn of the news cycle on Twitter shows up the gadfly nature of the media’s attention span, it’s healthy to see the long view as well, and Morris has found the perfect example of a scandal that keeps on giving. As a welcome contrast to the nonsense we find ourselves transfixed by in recent times, it’s great to experience a truly novel tabloid story: there is no way I’m going to spoil any of the twists and turns of McKinney’s life. Suffice it to say, she is a fantastically engaging and amusing individual, and some of the oddest moments of her life happened more recently than you would think. I saw “better” movies at the festival, but Tabloid is almost certainly the most amusing and infectiously enjoyable, and watching it with such an appreciative audience was an early highlight.

November 29, 2010 - Posted by admiralneck | Black Swan, Blue Valentine, Darren Aronofsky, Errol Morris, Gillian Wearing, London Film Festival, London Film Festival 2010, Michelle Williams, Mila Kunis, Paul W.S. Anderson, Self Made, Tabloid, Twitter