Well this is a strange movie. Between this and unreleased The Other Side of the Wind (until 2018 that is), Welles clearly was in an experimental stage of his career by the 1970s. He wanted to push the limits of what a film was. As such, it is best to go in with an open mind.
I honestly thought F for Fake was a fake documentary. Like completely made up. And, well, that's not a wrong impression, per sé. You truly don't know what to believe. But to my surprise, despite seeming like a fake person, Elmyr de Hory is in fact real, and him being an art forger is real.
Okay, so the backstory to this movie is pretty interesting, as all backstories to Welles movies seem to be. The accepted story is that Francois Reichenbach filmed a documentary about Hory, which featured his biographer Clifford Irving. He then handed it to Welles to edit.
Sometime in this process, Irving was revealed to be a fraud himself. He claimed to have had interviews with famous recluse Howard Hughes, and wrote a biography on him. Only trouble was that it was not real. He made it up. And this news broke sometime in the editing process.
For Welles, this was too good to be true. Suddenly, it was not just a documentary on Hory, but a documentary on something larger. No, he was going to comment on fraud itself, and compare making a movie to fraud. A filmmaker's ability to fool the audience with trickery.
And actually, the way he did this was quite clever. Like almost too clever for its own good. Because he purposefully makes you question if what you're watching even really happened. Which is directly commenting on a movie fooling you. In this instance, how the framing of a documentary can mislead you. But also just a normal movie. And he used the art forgery of Hory, and the fraud of a skilled writer as a backdrop to make these points.
He references his own career. His famous War of the Worlds broadcast, the story of which seems mostly apocryphal, no doubt egged on by Welles himself. Were people really in a panic over his broadcast? It may have happened, but it has definitely taken a life of its own and has been overstated to an insane degree. Most people were not stupid. But he eggs this myth on. He reads from the War of the Worlds broadcast, but doesn't say the same words as the original broadcast. But the way its filmed, you think it is.
In another lucky twist of fate, the fact that Irving was a fake biographer of Howard Hughes worked out quite nicely because the original subject of Citizen Kane was going to be Hughes. Or at least that's what this movie tells me. It could very well be bullshit. Welles said he was going to tell the true for the first hour. This information was in that hour.
This is all pretty brilliant, but there is one weakness in this movie: the Oja Kador sequences. I get her place in the movie. It's adding to the unreliability of the whole thing. But it's just not interesting. The fact that everything about her story ends up being fake makes it even less interesting than it already was.
I don't have a solution for this problem. Kador herself just isn't that compelling. You need something like her, a fake story to help with the movie's themes. And I hate to say it but the fact that she's his mistress in real life makes it seem like she's just in this movie because she's his mistress. Which is pretty much true. And it seems like that too!
Her presence in The Other Side of the Wind works better, because she's just walking around in an experimental art movie making fun of experimental art movies while an entirely different movie is happening and she has basically no impact on the final product.
I do wish I found the Kador scenes more compelling, because I think I'd find this to be a masterpiece otherwise. But 25 or so minutes of a short movie weigh it down enough that it's not particularly close to a masterpiece. It's still a good movie though.
3/4 stars
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