Word: faked
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...message is that art may just be a big gimmick. Unfortunately, F for Fake, as a gimmick on gimmicks, soon begins to wear thin...
...exhibitionist style cloys, because as pure documentary F for Fake has such potential. Welles tracks deHory down in Ibiza, a picturesque Spanish island, where the forger has given up his life of crime for a jolly semi-retirement. (He no longer sells his fakes--Picassos, Modiglianis, Matisses and Van Dongen--but still occupies a villa provided by an art dealer who has turned a handsome middleman's profit on deHory's imitations...
...Welles couldn't have graciously ceded the spotlight to deHory, instead of forcing himself, and his own legerdemain, to center stage. He keeps butting--reciting from Kipling, lumbering through fog in Ireland, gluttoning himself with oysters and steaks. Somehow this went over big in Europe, where F for Fake has already played. Some superstars have only to throw a little self-adulation into their work--their childhood memories, their hors-d'oeuvres, their kitchen sinks--and eager-tongued adulators lap it up. Welles and Barbara Walters...
When his own ego is sated, Welles rolls on with self-indulgence to spare, he introduces into F for Fake, for no apparent reason, a young Hungarian protegee named Oja Kodar. Not only a svelte, swarthy beauty, he assures us, but a major new talent: brilliant, sophisticated, articulate. Welles then proceeds to regale himself with two quarter-hour sequences of Kodar parading her proportions around Parisien, and then Hungarian streets...
...remains nothing if not slick, though, and F for Fake still manages to stay one step ahead of the critic. Throughout the film Welles polemicizes against the expert. Who's to judge authenticity? Is there any such thing as true documentary? If not, who's to knock Welles for all this narrative cutsiness? What's the aim of art: to please the critics or the public? As long as deHory--and in this case, Welles--gets away with it, who's to condemn...