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August 3, 2010

That Catfish trailer

The best film I saw in Park City last January might not have been Catfish, but there's no denying that it packed the strongest punch; my jaw was on the floor for the majority of its running time. In the lobby afterwards, Amy Taubin was throwing up her hands in disgust, while I made a brief attempt to trace the source of the disquiet I myself was feeling. I'd say that I have to see it again to decide, but I also wonder if this is a film that even can be seen a second time. When an initial viewing serves up such a punch in the gut, can the second allow room for anything other than intense and rapid deconstruction?

Regardless, it's definitely requisite viewing when it hits theaters this fall. The trailer that just hit answers the question of how one market this film without betraying its Russian Doll's worth of surprises (even the title is casually misleading). The solution is pretty close to what I imagined after the screening: which is that you market it like a horror film, an approach that isn't entirely inaccurate. The suspense that is so literally implied in the trailer escalates to nearly unbearable levels during the film, but it's building towards a different sort of crescendo.

It's a great trailer, but while I'm ambivalent about the manipulation it employs, the intersecting lines of good marketing, good filmmaking and overall ethics make for some tricky ground: it's the task of the marketing team to build a sense of mystery, but do they vicariously inherit any of the filmmakers' responsibility to their subjects? Taubin's chief complaint about the film was that the directors Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost cruelly exploited their subject (a similar sentiment was hinted at by Manohla Dargis in her article on the film post Sundance). By reducing this potential quandary into and advertising hook, any potential callowness on the part of the filmmakers would seem to be exacerbated.

I personally didn't find Catfish to be callow, and I think I struggled less with its authenticity than with its sincerity. Or was it the other way around? (These are the the three basic attributes which I also shuffled around while forming my opinion of Kurt Kuenne's 2008 documentary Dear Zachary; in that case, they fell in a different but oddly comparable arrangement.) It's as if there's some root discomfort that kicks in when one can't quite put their finger on a nonfiction film. This particular one is indeed a rollercoaster ride, as the trailer proclaims, but it is a curiously disorienting one.

Posted by David Lowery at August 3, 2010 11:15 PM