Storytelling [DVD] [2001]

If you've seen "Happiness" then "Storytelling" may disappoint you at first. Initially, it's not nearly as funny, exchanging humour for darkness. This mainly arises from the division of the film into two halves; fiction and non-fiction. Fiction is 20 minutes of the most bleak, uncompromising and horrible film-making I have seen. By horrible I mean that it's very difficult to watch because what you are seeing is not nice in any sense of that over-used word. It focuses on Selma Blair, a girl at college on what is presumably a creative writing course.

The film opens on her having sex with her disabled boyfriend, who then proceeds to ask her opinion on the story he has written for said class. She thinks it's fine, but when the class instructor, a black Pulitzer prize winning novelist, hears it he says that it is awful, which it is. He gets angry with her, she goes off and basically ends up having sex with the teacher. None of this is easy to watch. But that is probably Solondz's point. He subverts our opinions of what we are watching, even reversing ideas about which characters we are prejudiced towards and which we favourable towards so as not to be prejudiced. I won't give anymore away than I already have, but I have to say that I did not like it at all because it made me ask questions I didn't really want to. In some ways that makes it excellent, but no matter what you think of the opening segment, nor how much you want to stop watching it, keep on going, because the second part - non-fiction - is absolutely brilliant.

The reason Solondz includes the opening story is because it joins perfectly with the second story, and puts it in a different light. Imagine the difference between watching a film normally, or watching a film before which the director has told you a number to things to contemplate while you watch the film. It's like that in a way, because while "non-fiction" does work as a separate film, it is much more powerful in light of what has gone before it. At base level, "Non-fiction" is a riotous black-comedy. It features John Goodman, who Coens' fans will know is a comedy genius, as the father of a dysfunctional family. At one end of the family you have Scooby, a perma-stoned wannabe high-school drop out trying to come to terms with his sexuality by listening to Elton John records, in the middle there's Brady, an American football playing jock, and a the other end there's Mikey, a child genius who is inadvertently and highly amusingly uber-racist, but not because he would have to conscious of it to be so. Indeed, this is where much of the humour in non-fiction comes from; people say things they shouldn't but their innocence makes them sound funny.

Anyway, this family become the subject of a documentary by Toby Oxman, a one-time high-school sweetheart, whose life has disintegrated with his hairline. Having given up hopes of acting, he has set his heart on making a documentary on high school students. At around this point, you start asking some major questions, and "Storytelling" starts to take on new dimensions. First off the actor playing Toby Oxman is a doppelganger for the director Todd Solondz himself, linking the documentary maker with the director. Secondly in light of the first film you being to see the idea of exploitation differently. In fact, every theme you thought would have cropped up in "Fiction" crops up in "Non-fiction" and vice-versa. Even the titles could be changed, as the "fiction" written in that story is painfully autobiographical, yet treated as fiction, while the "non-fiction" documentary becomes fictional, as we begin to see how much of the lives of these real people are fantasy and lies.

I'm not going to write anymore, mainly because I don't want to spoil it, and any further probing into "non-fiction" would give the plot away inexcusably. I'll conclude by saying that once you are past the first 20 minutes the film is a joy, with many extremely funny moments, especially the scenes with John Goodman in. And if you want to you can just watch the film as a black-comedy, in which case I'd recommend that you take the option provided by the DVD of just watching the "non-fiction" segment. Equally you can watch the whole film and start to ask questions. Because like Coens films, "Storytelling" is a film that will become more and more rewarding with each view.

In any case, this film comes thoroughly recommended.