Bastardy

Thursday afternoon was Bastardy, Amiel Courtin-Wilson's character portrait of Aboriginal actor and occassional cat-burglar Jack Charles. It's a very good film, and all the more exciting for being set in Melbourne and throwing new light on some familiar places, but in filmmaking terms it does raise a conundrum.

As with Blind Loves, from earlier this week, several scenes are clearly dramatisations, in which Jack acts out aspects of his own life. I'm in two minds about this as a documentary technique. On the one level, getting your subject to play themselves is as realistic as a dramatisation could be, and arguably no more a performance than someone describing something to the camera in an interview. Either way, it's their interpretation and depiction of their own behaviour.

It's not in terms of realism that I see a problem with it, but rather in terms of viewer reaction. Take for example the sequence where the audience first discover Jack is a burglar. The scene is a darkened house belonging to clearly wealthy people. You see his hands rifling through drawers and extracting valuables. It's a dramatic scene but the moment it starts, my mind took a step back from the film. I started thinking "oh this hasn't been shot for real, I wonder how they did it? ...is this a set or did they use a real house? ...did they direct him to open that drawer or did they just hide valuables in a room and get him to find them as he would if he was performing a robbery...?" and so forth.

At the same time as the dramatised sequence offers an insight into the character, it also creates a distance from the audience by making them think about the film-making process rather than the story. Both Blind Loves and Bastardy had this effect on me at some point. With Bastardy it was probably to a greater extent, because Blind Loves flagged that it would do this very early in the piece and had an overall feel of romantic fable, whereas Bastardy at times took a tone of gritty realism. Notably both these films are character portraits and it is perhaps in these types of pieces where you can blur the line between live action and drama most effectively, when it is personality rather than facts that you're trying to convey.