With more and more content arriving on
popular streaming services, I’ll start with a small screen pick
The Family (2019
Netflix)
Netflix is not afraid of controversy and
has been pouring money into “docuseries”, of which this five-episode offering
is the latest. It has production backing
from Alex Gibney’s Jigsaw Pictures and is helmed by Jesse Moss who directed the
outstanding 2014 documentary The
Overnighters that focused on pastoral help to a troubled transient
population drawn to North Dakota’s then booming energy industry. There’s a troubling spiritual angle here as
well, but the subjects are those in society’s elite positions not at the bottom.
The
“family” of the title is a “fellowship” foundation that claims to follow Jesus
and “nothing else”. It also prefers to
remain as invisible as possible. With origins traced back to a Seattle founding
father of Norwegian descent, the organization has become the force behind the
U.S. National Prayer Breakfast and similar activities in many countries, hence
the suspicions of surreptitious global reach. For a half century its key
American figure was the late Doug Coe who was known to many powerful men. The fellowship owned an Alexandria mansion
‘The Cedars” and a “C Street” private residence where influential gatherings
supposedly took place. Our guide to the “family network” is journalist Jeff Sharlet,
author of the 2008 book The Family: The
Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. Sharlet had spent time in an affiliated group
residence “Ivanwald” for young men dedicated to Jesus. (There was a separate
segregated residence for young women, apparently taught to be handmaidens to
these Jesus-loving men, but we learn little about it.)
The
early episode investigations use re-enactments which I’m not a fan of. And although Moss interviews a number of
participants who claim no ulterior agenda (it’s “just Jesus”), the series is
clearly critical of an approach it finds to be insidious and
anti-democratic. After all, the family’s
gospel is directed at ministering to powerful men who, even if great sinners,
are encouraged to think of themselves as “chosen” in some way. That can be exploited by the Christian right
to push reactionary policies, or by strongmen in power (there are scenes
involving Putin and Trump) who can be flattered to think of themselves as on
the godly side of things. The focus on using
men of power and influence is certainly in contrast to the gospels’
“preferential option for the poor”.
This is a Christ
for those with the most not the least, which makes the upshot of the docuseries
quite disturbing even if its dark insinuations can seem overblown. It does help to explain how someone as
unchristian and morally depraved as Donald Trump can be embraced by
conservative evangelicals as if he were doing God’s work, as observed in this review:
There Are No Fakes (Canada
2019 https://www.therearenofakes.com/)
Writer-director Jamie Kastner’s
astonishing documentary starts with the purchase, by Barenaked Ladies’ musician
Kevin Hearn for $20,000, of a painting by Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau
who was acclaimed as “the Picasso of the north”. After loaning the work to an exhibition at
the Art Gallery of Ontario, curators determined it to be a fake and took it
down. Hearn sued the gallery from which
he bought it. That legal case is just the
start of a tangled web of deceit and horrific violence. Morrisseau, who died in 2007, was a
residential school survivor who sank into drug and alcohol addictions. He was
also bisexual and vulnerable to exploitation.
Digging deeper, Kastner uncovers a Thunder Bay-based counterfeit ring
involving several of Norval’s close relatives.
Worse, the kingpin was a violent sexual predator who molested First
Nations boys coming from reserves. To
the distress of Morrisseau’s adopted son, and Morrisseau himself in sworn
statements, the result was a vast output of inferior work beyond what he had
actually painted, much of it acquired by an auctioneer, galleries, and
collectors. Questions about the authenticity of many works has them concerned
to protect the value of their holdings. That’s the complicit mantra behind the
“there are no fakes” title. In addition
to the shameless misuse of a great Indigenous Canadian artist, whatever his
afflictions, the details of this story are truly sordid and shocking. Buyer
beware indeed. A
Le Mystère Henri Pick (France/Belgium
2019)
Paintings are not the only subject for
artistic hoaxes. Among the many delights of this witty satire from Gaumont
(‘depuis que le cinéma existe’) from director and co-writer Rémi Bezançon—adapting
the eponymous novel by David Foenkinos—is the brilliant central performance by
Fabrice Luchini as the often exasperated (and exasperating) Jean-Michel Rouche,
a pompous literary critic hosting a television show, until upset by a sudden
literary phenomenon he is convinced is fraudulent. The sensation is caused by the publication of
an acclaimed novel “The Last Hours of a Love Affair” by a hitherto unknown and
deceased author—the Henri Pick of the title—owner of a pizzeria, who was never
seen to read or write by a wife who nonetheless stands by the unlikely story (and
has a typewriter to prove it). The
manuscript was supposedly found by a young woman Daphne Despero (Alice Isaaz) in
a “Library of Rejected Books”. The
location is the coastal village of Crozon in the northwest Finistère department
of Brittany. There are also Russian/Pushkin
connections. Having lost his wife and
job over the affair, Rouche is determined to get to the truth, teaming up with
Pick’s initially hostile daughter Joséphine (Camille Cottin). He discovers that
the deceased founder of the Crozon library had a marriage of convenience with a
Russian émigré Ludmilla Blavitsky (a cameo by the great German actress Hanna
Schygulla best known for her work with Rainer Werner Fassbinder). Earlier
there’s a brief scene with a Bénédicte Le Floch who had borrowed and never
returned a Pushkin book. (Let me explain
how I enjoyed the Breton connections. My
Le Grand grandparents came to Canada from Finistère. Indeed Breton not French was their mother
tongue. I’ve been to Crozon, which is not far from Landévennec where a cousin
of my mother’s belonged to the 5th century Benedictine abbey. And on
my grandmother's side, near Plonévez-Porzay I have relatives named Le Floch
whose hospitality I’ve enjoyed.)
Enough
with the personal digressions. Suffice
to say that another key character is Daphne’s boyfriend, a frustrated writer Fred
Koskas (Bastien Bouillon), who is after Rouche to read his novel Le Baignoire
(“The Bathtub”). Rouche’s search for
vindication leads to a veritable Russian roulette of ruses. All told, a most amusing time at the
movies. A
Instant Dreams (Netherlands
2017 http://instantdreamsmovie.com/)
The title of writer-director Willem
Baptist’s strange exploration refers to the almost instant prints made by
Polaroid cameras. It came to Ottawa’s
Mayfair repertory theatre that has a penchant for oddities, and I also once
owned a Polaroid camera—stolen in 1975 on a day trip to Tijuana, Mexico of all
places. I still have a few Polaroid prints.
Baptist does give a few details of the “one-step photography” invented
by the notoriously secretive Edwin Land in 1947. The founder is long gone and the original Polaroid
company also is no more. Although there are still “instant cameras” around (see
more at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_camera),
the analog photochemical process—which a former Polaroid scientist Stephen
Herschen is shown obsessively trying to recreate—has been almost completely
superseded by the digital revolution.
Another subject is Christopher Bonanos, author of Instant: The Story of Polaroid who takes polaroids of his young son
every day. But by far the weirdest
character is the eccentric Stephanie Schneider, a desert dweller who keeps a
stash of expired Polaroid film in a fridge in her trailer. Typically clothed in
a pink dressing gown, her work includes staging lesbian poses in the desert
environs. There’s also a snap-happy
young Japanese woman using a smartphone, perhaps indicating today’s
Instagram-type gratification? Layered over this are some psychedelic sequences
and portentous philosophizing voice-overs. This dream is mainly for nostalgia buffs
since few photographs are printed anymore. Why bother when billions of
smartphone images can be shared virtually instantly across the globe? B
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