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Review of F for Fake

Review of F for Fake
Vincent Canby

"I'm a charlatan," says Orson Welles, looking very fit, his manner that of the practiced con artist who knows that if he confesses to everything, he will be held accountable for nothing. Or is it the other way around?

This is the beginning of Mr. Welles's latest film, "F for Fake," a charming, witty meditation upon fakery, forgery, swindling and art, a movie that may itself be its own Exhibit A.

The opening sequence is set in a fine old European railroad station, the kind with a peaked glass roof that romantics cherish, that Mr. Welles used in "The Trial" and that urban renewal people tear down. On a colder, snowy day, Anna Karenina might throw herself under some wheels here, but now it's sunny and warm. The mood is cheerfully skeptical.

Mr. Welles, the master of ceremonies, the credited director and writer as well as star of "F for Fake," welcomes us with some sleight of hand, turning a small boy's key into a coin and back again. "The key," says the charlatan, "is not symbolic of anything." The warnings keep coming, and you may be reminded of the late Old Gold slogan: "It's fun to be fooled, but more fun to know." Perhaps sometimes.

"F for Fake" is a documentary compounded of tricks, reversals, interviews with real forgers and re-creations of events that never happened. It's as much magic show as movie, a lark that is great fun even when one wishes the magician would take off his black slouch hat and his magician's cape and get back to making real movies. But did he really make this one? And is "F for Fake" not a real movie?

There are amused rumors to the effect that Mr. Welles did not actually direct a large part of "F for Fake." This part is an extended sequence set in Ibiza involving interviews with Elmyr de Hory, the well-publicized art forger, and Clifford Irving, who wrote Mr. de Hory's biography ("Fake") and later went on to make his own name by attaching it to Howard Hughes's.

The rumors are that these scenes were shot by François Reichenbach, one of the first practitioners of cinéma vérité, who himself shows up throughout "F for Fake," for which he receives credit as the production coordinator. "F for Fake" is so stylish in all its parts, in its editing and particularly in a final fiction sequence that, if it is a fake, it's a marvelous one, and to hell with the signature on it.

Which is one of the things that "F for Fake" is all about. Midway through the film, after we've listened to stories that may or may not be true about Mr. de Hory's sucess in supplying the art world with fake Matisses, Picassos and Modiglianis, Mr. Welles reminds us that there are no signatures on the cathedral at Chartres. Chartres needs no "experts" to authenticate its grandeur, he says. "Experts" are the villans of "F for Fake"—people who must tell us whether we should swoon when looking at a particular painting or turn up our noses in disgust.

Mr. Welles, who has been the subject of a lot of such expertise and takes a dim view of it, has a grand time with the film's final. This is the fanciful story of how Picasso was tricked by a ravishing Hungarian model, whose grandfather, an art forger, confesses on his deathbed to a furious Picasso that his dearest desire has always been to create "an entirely new Picasso period."

I have some minor reservations about "F for Fake." I don't share Mr. Welles's affection for either Mr. de Hory or Mr. Irving. Unlike the generous Mr. Welles, they are small potatoes. When Mr. Welles asks, "Doesn't it say something about our time that Cliff [Irving] could only make it through trickery?," my answer is no. It says more about Mr. Irving, who as far as I can tell, hasn't made it at all.

DMU Timestamp: January 07, 2015 02:48





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