F for Fake is unique not only among Welles's films, but among films in general. It's an essay, a hoax, a personal narrative, a shaggy-dog tale, The elliptical flow and tangential wanderings remind me a bit of Chris Marker's films, except that Fake has more of a "Pull my finger" quality. It's like listening to Orson Welles expound on life and art after about six bottles of good red wine, when his wisdom is a bit cloudy and his speech a bit slurred, but his chuckling charm more than makes up for the interior punchlines he shares that no one in the room but him might understand. Fake is a densely layered, often bafflingly edited piece that interweaves the stories of Elmyr de Hory (at the time, the world's most notorious art forger … today that title is held by Quentin Tarantino), Clifford Irving (Elmyr's biographer, who himself was revealed as a fraud for writing a bogus autobiography of Howard Hughes), and Welles himself (who dissects his own artistic charlatanism in several ways). To complicate matters, Welles slices and dices footage from a genuine documentary on Elmyr directed by François Reichenbach, whose complicity in the creation of Fake helps to blur the lines considerably. Welles ingeniously edits interviews together to create conversations that never happened, and cross-cuts new and old footage, and blends still and motion photography, to create situations that never transpired. All of this is in the name of exploring the question of "What is art?" and the fallacy of critical expertise. The brilliance of Welles's approach is that in the process of questioning the legitimacy of any "objective" assessment of art, he created a film that quite perfectly thwarts every criterion by which one might assess it. You either like it or you don't; feel you "get" it or feel alienated by it; go along for the ride or fall asleep. Perhaps depending on your mood, you even might have any of these reactions—that's how elusive it is. Wait a moment, did I actually manage to independently use the word "criterion" in a review of a Criterion Collection DVD? That kind of rules. The stuff on Elmyr and Clifford Irving is intriguing (I believe there are separate biopics in development on each of these guys), but in my view the film is at is most charming when it focuses on Welles himself, at this point in his career in full Falstaff bloom, mixing the self-deprecating wit that was always there with a puckish gleam in his eye that hasn't yet been drowned out by daily barrels of Gallo wine. He holds court in bistros, flanked by adoring socialites, pontificating with complete awareness of his simultaneous foolishness and wisdom. He speculates poetically on Howard Hughes's mysterious latter days holed up in a Vegas hotel room, yet it all seems to be about Welles – reinforced by a winning cameo from Joseph Cotten, relating the not-surprising story of how Citizen Kane was originally inspired by Hughes instead of Hearst. It seems like Welles is trying to get to the bottom of his own personal mysteries, asking himself whether he was, as a person here on Earth, ultimately a king or a joker. And not reaching a conclusion except to consider that it probably does not really matter, in the grand scheme of things. The film's final reel is a stunning sequence fantasizing about a supposed "lost episode" in the life of Pablo Picasso, involving a steamy summer when Oja Kodar (Welles's mistress) inspired an entirely new Picasso period, then absconded with the paintings. This segment is both a masturbatory ode to Kodar and a really good tall tale, which finally ties things together with what looks like photos of an apocyphal meeting between Picasso and Elmyr de Hory—raising the only slightly tongue-in-cheek question: "Which was the greater artist?" Welles said he wanted to make a whole series of "essay" films (crockumentaries, that is), though as with many—probably most—things Welles wanted to do, he never did get to it. But that would have been a fascinating little body of work … sort of the cinematic equivalent of Glenn Gould's radio experiments. Genius and bullshit are peas in a pod—though few geniuses have ever been as willing to admit this as explicitly as Welles did in F for Fake.
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