Great documentary filmmaker Errol Morris interviews the re-inventor of spy fiction John le Carré, shortly before the writer’s death. It is a series of deep conversations during which Carré goes into some very private facets of his personality and life but also shows himself – rather expectedly when you’ve read a little about the man’s background – a great raconteur, looking back at his life with a distance towards those things he hates or loves about himself or what happened in his life. He still loathes Kim Philby, though, but also sees him as a mirror of his own failings of character and personality. Of course, the author would argue, he doesn’t believe there’s such a thing as a core personality.
Consequently, much of what le Carré talks about with Morris circles around the flexibility of personality and truth, of autobiographical truth and untruth, speaks of masks and betrayals, and of how to take elements of reality and shape them into narratives. All of this clearly resonates with Morris’s own work as a filmmaker, his questions about truth, truthfulness and artificiality. It is clear Morris is little interested in le Carré’s biography as a simple, linear progression of facts but rather tries to talk with the writer about how one can attempt to be truthful about a subject, say oneself, even when it is impossible to be absolutely, abstractly truthful. Critical distance is not a concept that makes sense here, and if you go into the film expecting something more to contemporary tastes, interested in judging le Carré on his autobiography, you’ll probably go away disappointed. But then, that’s hardly what one should expect from Morris.
To my eyes, The Pigeon Tunnel is a fascinating, and often very entertaining, film that doesn’t quite try to hide its philosophical questions behind le Carré’s abilities as a storyteller, and that also happens to express rather a lot of ideas about human nature and the world I tend to share. At least on some days.
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