F for Fake (1973)

If Cit­i­zen Kane, The Mag­nif­i­cent Amber­sons, Touch of Evil, The Tri­al and Chimes at Mid­night are Orson Welles’ hearty and sub­stan­tial cin­e­mat­ic plats prin­ci­paux, then F for Fake is his dev­il­ish lit­tle after din­ner diges­tif whose flavours are no less intense, com­plex and robust.

“Ladies and gen­tle­man, by way of intro­duc­tion, this is a film about trick­ery, fraud, about lies,” announces the ever-puck­ish Welles to cam­era as his joc­u­lar, fleet-foot­ed film essay fires up. Of course, as much as it’s a film about trick­ery, fraud and lies, it is in itself a cap­ti­vat­ing rid­dle, reel­ing off a ripped-from-the-head­lines yarn about Europe’s pre­mière fine art forg­er and employ­ing it as a gaudy cov­er for its quick­fire philo­soph­i­cal explo­ration into the mys­ter­ies of author­ship and the worth of so-called ​‘con­nois­seurs’.

Dove­tailed with the account of mon­o­cled social gad­fly, Elymr de Hory – a man who dash­es off repli­ca Modiglia­n­is between break­fast and brunch – is the sto­ry of biog­ra­ph­er Clif­ford Irv­ing, whose book, Fake!, chron­i­cled the life of Elmyr. Irv­ing then went on to write a biog­ra­phy of Howard Hugh­es which, it tran­spired, was also a fake.

Now keep up here: Irv­ing, Elmyr and Orson Welles come togeth­er in a lux­u­ry, booze-filled apart­ment in Ibiza, two career fak­ers and a self-described ​“char­la­tan” who pro­fess­es to have made a film about lies and is doing his utmost to obfus­cate the so-called ​‘facts’ at every hair­pin turn.

In a short doc­u­men­tary filmed for the DVD release of F for Fake, Chica­go-based cinephile Jonathan Rosen­baum explains that Welles made this film as reac­tion to the ​“experts” who attempt­ed to pigeon­hole his style and keep score of his recur­rent direc­to­r­i­al tics. Strobe edits, throw­away cam­era trick­ery, smash-zooms, footage of Welles fum­bling in the edit room, and a wry, lit­er­ate nar­ra­tion all coa­lesce as an attempt to forge a new and orig­i­nal mode of mod­ern sto­ry­telling. Just the edit­ing alone is a thing of rare beauty.

If Welles larg­er-than-life per­sona weren’t so utter­ly inte­gral to the con­cep­tion of F for Fake, you’d be hard pressed to guess that it was his giant hand behind the tiller. But that’s kin­da the point: Is Chartres Cathe­dral any less daz­zling in light of the fact that no-one knows who built it? Indeed, you might see F for Fake as devel­op­ing the notion of the mod­ern film essay, in that by its final reels you come to realise Elmyr and Irv­ing were mere pawns at the cen­tre of Welles’ brain-teas­ing intel­lec­tu­al treatise.

Even at a trim 87 min­utes, the film is so dense that you’ll need to give it mul­ti­ple run-throughs to draw out all the details and ref­er­ences. At the same time, it’s arguably Welles most super­fi­cial­ly enjoy­able film, and even if you become total­ly con­fused by its inten­tions and inti­ma­tions, you can still let the for­mal pyrotech­nics wash over you with the help of Michel Legrand’s fun­time big band Euro pop score.

But don’t for one minute come away from the film think­ing you’ve ful­ly under­stood it. No. For ever lie you think you may have decod­ed, every sleight-of-hand you think you may have noticed, rest assured: Welles has a thou­sand more up his bil­low­ing sleeve.