Lorna Irvine reviews a flawed film that's 'good fun and lovingly made'.
With numerous jump-cuts, split-screen, odd angles and other European influences, Orson Welles' typically knowing post-modern tricks run through this somewhat dated piece, a meditation on cinematic parlour games.
Welles, in unreliable narrator mode in hat and cape like a Faustian figure, is sick of playing the Hollywood game--something he cheerfully alludes to several times, knowing his creative peak has flatlined.
Chasing an art faker of dubious quality (the highly improbable Elmyr de Hory) around France and Spain, where he holds court during large lunches, Welles makes grand sonorous pronouncements on art and film making, such as, 'A magician is just an actor... playing the part of an actor' to his guffawing audience--that is, when the camera isn't leeringly lingering on Oja Kodar, supposedly another of Picasso's muses, and a bit of (limited) stuff.
It's flawed all right, but often enormously good fun and lovingly made, with sly humour and nice gags at the expense of Welles' own shortcomings as an artist, filtered through a Howard Hughes' parallel storyline at one point, and painters who refused to grow old gracefully, like Matisse and Picasso. The joke wears pretty thin once you have sussed it. Sadly, the real star seems to be Welles' rampant egotism.
Part of the Orson Welles season at GFT
"F for Fake" original trailer by Orson Welles: http://youtu.be/TMkZWWLHGXU
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