Storytelling (2001)

Synopsis: (1) 'Fiction': A Literature student is dumped by her boyfriend and classmate; she goes out the same night and runs into her Creative Writing teacher. (2) 'Nonfiction': A struggling documentary maker is making a film about Scooby, who is in his senior year in high school and doesn't want to go to college despite his father's pressure for him to apply.
Appraisal: This film may seem a little harsh on its characters and many people have criticized the filmmaker for this; for me, it is his best quality; remember Gide - "c'est avec les bons sentiments qu'on fait la mauvaise littérature", something along the lines of "it's with good feelings that one makes bad literature" -- "good feelings" here meaning feelings of the sappy type, hypocrisy, etc. The first story is frankly caricatural -- there is the moron, the lesbian, the teacher's pet, the prude, etc. On a superficial look, the moral of this first segment seems to be that people won't recognize a true story when they see one, because they are blinded by their beliefs or prejudices. But I also think that the professor is right: 'when you put it down on paper, it becomes fiction', so it matters less whether it really happened than whether it's rendered with technique, style and inventiveness. The second segment deals with the making of a documentary, so credibility is not an issue here. Of course there is the ethical issue of exploitation, and this may be the central issue here, but I think another point that is implied is that documentaries shouldn't be regarded as 'true' (or even 'truer' than fiction) simply because they have real people and events in them; after all, films, even documentaries, are necessarily partial. We know a lot about this family that won't make it to the documentary, so it will present a partial, perhaps even distorted view of the family, one that, as we see in the preview session, will serve the purpose of reinforcing the pre-existent opinions and prejudices of its audience, rather than informing them and opening their minds to something they didn't know before. But it must be said that there is much more to this second segment than the documentary-making subplot; the family is quite interesting in itself.
Rating: 65