Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
Documents the lives of infamous fakers Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving. De Hory, who later committed suicide to avoid more prison time, made his name by selling forged works of art by painters like Picasso and Matisse. Irving was infamous for writing a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes. Welles moves between documentary and fiction as he examines the fundamental elements of fraud and the people who commit fraud at the expense of others.
F for Fake is one of cinema's great essay films — Welles's playful, self-referential meditation on authorship, fraud, and illusion is genuinely sui generis. The editing is dazzling and innovative, treating the cut itself as a conjurer's trick, earning a well-above-average cinematography mark. The plot structure — weaving documentary footage, re-enactments, and Welles's own carnival-barker narration into a seamless argument about fakery — is intellectually audacious and earns a 4. Novelty is unmistakably high: no other film quite does what this one does, and its influence on the essay-film form is enormous. Acting is harder to pin down in a documentary context; Welles is charismatic and de Hory is compelling, but the 'performances' are uneven across subjects. The ending, while thematically resonant with its Oja Kodar coda and Welles's admission of his own lies, feels slightly too self-congratulatory and abrupt to rank among the film's strongest moments.