The sine qua non of cinema is that it uses the unreal to portray the real. Not content with this fundamental artifice, however, these four movies work to blur the boundaries even further, leaving us with interesting questions about what, precisely, the nature of "reality" is.

Spoilers abound. Caveat lector...


All the photos were taken in 2002 in New Zealand, where the real can often appear unreal, hyper-real, or surreal

1.
Spencer
2021, Pablo Larrain

The focus of this movie is the late Diana, Princess of Wales, as we follow her attempts to navigate an excruciating three days at Sandringham, during the 1991 Christmas holidays, when the royal marriage has already hit the rocks.

For Mark Kermode, Larrain's movie "offers a bold and somewhat mysterious portrait of a woman searching for her own identity, conjuring 'a fable from a true tragedy' [as the movie styles itself right at the beginning] that, for all its dramatic invention, feels remarkably truthful".

I found myself tripping over the invention, however. I kept wondering, as I watched it: "Is this true? Did this happen?" It was distracting.

Needless to say, there are all manner of articles that pick over the niceties of what was "true" and what wasn't.

And it turns out that although there's much that did happen (most importantly, Diana's warm relationship with her children; the ailing marriage; her eating disorders and other forms of self-harm; and her sense of suffocation within the confines of the traditional Sandringham Christmas), there's much that's just "made up".



I totally understand that films have to SHOW things, and the invented elements act as symbols. The importance of the (invented) warm and supportive dresser, for example, illustrates the emotional void in Diana's life; the presence (even omnipresence) of Major Gregory (also fictional) conveys her discomfort at always being watched. And the surreal episodes serve to underline these more prosaic inventions: the ghost of Anne Boleyn (repudiated so that her husband could marry the woman he really loved); the breaking and eating of the hated string of pearls (the idea of drinking your cup of suffering to the dregs, as it were); the derelict family house (representing the wreckage of her childhood aspirations); and the ghostly scene where we see her in costume after costume (young royal women, you have to suspect, are primarily child-bearers and clothes-horses).

So all this -- the real and the unreal -- forms a composite that is certainly sympathetic to the princess.

Nevertheless, it somehow seems unfair. This was a real person, and she's dead, and can't object or comment. Would she have appreciated what is essentially a sympathetic portrayal, even if it plays fast and loose with the truth? And what about her children? Is it OK to just make stuff up about their mother?

Of course, there can be no neutral biography, just as there can be no neutral history. Every story of a life is an interpretation. That being the case, we often want to take issue with the editorial line taken by a biographer. Why include that, and not this? Why emphasize that, and downplay the other? But that's a far cry from making stuff up...

I ruminated on all these issues when I wrote about Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. But the ambiguous subject there -- the Tim O'brien who resembled, but did not equate to, the author himself -- was under the control of the Tim O'brien who was the creator. It would have been an entirely different kettle of fish if someone else had come along, and written an equivocal story about Tim O'Brien...

Call me old-fashioned, but if you're making a film about a real person that's not you, my view is that you need to stick to the documented evidence...



Which brings us to...

2.
Promise at Dawn (La promesse de l'aube)
2017, Eric Barbier

It's a film that has divided critics, with some finding it "spectacular", others "too tame".

I'm inclined to agree with Hubert Heyrendt, who calls it a "superb adaptation", and recognizes the difficulty of pulling off an adaptation of a book that is itself an adaptation -- a semi-fictionalization -- of a life...

I read the book last year. Fascinated by the mixture of fact and fiction in what purports to be a memoir, I wrote quite a long post) about it.

The movie followed the book fairly closely. Indeed, much of the dialogue is taken verbatim from the text, and many of the passages I highlighted in that post duly make their appearance.

At the beginning, however, I was not sure what I was getting into. Rather than opening, as in the book, with the author on the beach at Big Sur, in supremely self-reflective and melancholy mode, we begin in a small town in Mexico, during the Day of the Dead celebrations. Gary's first wife, Lesley Blanch (never mentioned in the book), is present, and Gary himself is being a childish, cantankerous pain.

Courtesy of another of those inestimable "dossiers pedagogiques" that I so appreciate, however, I learnt that this event is recorded in Blanch's memoir of Gary (entitled Romain, un regard particulier). They were on holiday, but all Gary wanted to do was shut himself up in his hotel room to work. To block out the noise of the fiesta, he made himself earplugs. When he started having terrible headaches, he was convinced he had a brain tumour, and demanded to be taken to Mexico City, as he didn't want to die in the boondocks. The film-maker has Blanch (who lived to be 103, by the way...) reading the first draft of Gary's "memoir" on the journey to Mexico City (where his headaches were diagnosed as the result of an ear infection caused by his stupid earplugs...)

Even having learnt that this opening is based on actual events (or maybe it's not, if Blanch, too, went in for embroidering the truth...), I'm still not convinced it was the right note to sound at the beginning. True, it shows something of the effect that Gary's late mother continued to bring to bear on his subsequent life and relationships, but it bothered me that we'd moved so far from the way HE launches and frames his story.



Gary is haunted by his mother's overpowering love and vaulting ambition for him. She meant well; yet her demands and expectations irreparably distorted his life. I thought of Gary's memoir on reading this article on perfectionism. This psychological scourge manifests itself as "a persecuting refrain which insists that you should do better. It breeds a highly motivating, but ultimately exhausting, obligation to become an idealised version of yourself: happier, fitter, richer". It becomes a compulsive drive to live to the expectations of others, "an internal monologue [that] tells us how we should be and what we should do".

The article continues: "The difficulty of escaping the snares of perfectionism suggests that it has a place deep in the structure of the human psyche. However we are brought up we internalise an ideal of the person we aspire to be... We are unwilling to extinguish the hope that, one day, we will be recognised as exceptional: the perfect being that our parents once placed on a pedestal."

And the answer? Well, it would have been useful for Gary: "Serge Leclaire, a French psychoanalyst, posited the intriguing idea that life sets us the task of metaphorically killing this wonderful child. We must continually renounce the fantasy of an ideal self and grieve its impossibility."



3.
The Ides of March
2011, George Clooney

We're plunged by this movie into the frenzy of a Democratic primary campaign. It's another adaptation, this time of a play (Farragut North), and again, the play, by Beau Willimon, was based on his personal experience working on several such campaigns, including Howard Dean's 2004 presidential bid.

The story introduces us to Stephen Meyers, the hard-working young press secretary for Mike Morris, one of the candidates. Meyers starts out idealistic and hopeful; Morris starts out sounding like a really decent guy. By the end of the movie, Morris is looking like another sleazeball, and Meyers has become a cynical blackmailer. Whatever happened? Well, ill-advised sexual relations, duplicity, betrayal, an abortion, a suicide...

It's a pretty depressing movie...

James Berardinelli: "The Ides of March illustrates the universally acknowledged truism that nothing can corrupt idealism more completely than politics. The sad thing about this American tragedy is that not a single twist, turn, or betrayal is difficult to accept. There's no 'willing suspension of disbelief' hurdle to clear. The sense of verisimilitude is such that, if not for the intimacy of the shots, it could easily be a documentary... The Ides of March is one of the most honest mainstream movies about American politics ever to be committed to the screen."

According to The Hollywood Reporter, pre-production was blocked in 2008, when Barack Obama became president, "because the film seemed too cynical for the optimistic mood of the day; a year later, it went back in production". Yeah, optimism rarely lasts in politics...



There are various hypotheses about who actually inspired the film. Willimon, who was also one of the scriptwriters, claims it draws from and blends elements from the stories of many different people.

In an interview, he explains another aspect of the reality/unreality link: "The upper echelons of the Dean campaign knew that we were going to lose Iowa weeks before. And all of us on the ground had been fighting and working hard as though we were going to win. That sort of disparity between perception and reality, between what the people in the inner sanctum know and what all the ground troops know is another thing that really stuck with me about the way that hierarchy, power dynamics and information operates in a campaign, that's in many ways different from our everyday lives... A lot of people might think that Stephen is a cynical or jaded character, or that's where he ends up. And maybe he does, by most people's standards. But really what he is, is a pragmatist, a realist. In order to get to the White House, you have to do things that most people would find ethically abhorrent. And no one is immune to it."

Like I said, depressing...



4.
La Belle Epoque
2019, Nicola Bedos

And finally, something completely different.

Imagine that you can pay a company to recreate a past era of your choice, in movie-like fashion, complete with sets, props, and actors, so that you can literally revisit old times and relive old scenes.

This is the opportunity offered to Victor, a washed-up, modernity-hating former cartoonist, who exudes a melange of mordant realism and self-destructive bitterness. Victor's wife, Marianne, is thoroughly fed up with him, and is seeing someone else. Victor, therefore, chooses to revisit the smoky old 1970s bistro, La Belle Epoque, where he and Marianne first met and fell in love. What he doesn't envisage, however, is falling in love with Margot, the real young woman whose job it is to play the youthful Marianne... So another scene is needed, to convince Victor that Margot's "real" life involves a husband and children.

The real Marianne, meanwhile, is discovering that she misses Victor. She too is drafted into the 1970s scene. Whether they actually patch things up is left opaque.



I nearly gave up on this movie. The opening scene (a particularly rowdy, satirical version of the time-travel phenomenon) is a bit too weird and overwhelming. But I'm glad we stuck with it. It's a fascinating concept... As Peter Debruge puts it: "Since each of these meticulously detailed re-creations amounts to an elaborate theatrical production, La Belle Époque also serves as a rich homage to the pleasures of performance. After all, a god-like director must work tirelessly behind the scenes, adapting on the fly and whispering cues in his actors’ ears to make the fantasy complete... Everything here [in the recreations] depends on a willing suspension of disbelief -- that fundamental contract of all good film and theater: To revisit May 16, 1974, Victor must ignore that he’s stepping onto a soundstage with lights hanging from trusses overhead... and where, if he studies any of the surfaces too closely, he’s liable to find that the wallpaper is peeling." And while all this is playing out, the directors and actors have their real (often stormy) relationships to contend with.

A fascinatingly wacky blend of the real and the unreal.

And, of course, it prompts the question: "Which era would YOU return to, if you could commission Time Travellers to work their magic?" My answer would be those wonderful 10 weeks in 2019 when we made our slow, overland way from London to Baku. It was a wonderful journey, full of interest and pleasure, and extraordinarily free of snags. We were retired already, so there was no work lurking in the wings to taint everything. We were not yet embroiled in our subsequent struggles with carbs and insurance. And there was no pandemic... Time Travellers provide for counter-factuals (one client-cum-actor talks to his dead dad), so I would specifically request that we didn't stop in Baku, but just carried on...