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A
LETTER TO TRUE
6/10
USA
2003 : Bruce WEBER : 78 mins
Bruce Weber
has been so wildly successful as a photographer that he's able to fund
intimate, agreeably tangential, wildly self-indulgent little diary/journal/essay/scrapbook
home-movies which then get picked up by the film-festival circuit and
end up obtaining worldwide arthouse distribution.
 Retaining
the free-floating structure of Chop
Suey, Weber's noodling musings here are very loosely held together
by his affection for dogs - True being one of his beloved pooches. It's
a four-legs-good fondness which happens to be shared by several of his
celebrity pals, including Dirk Bogarde and Elizabeth Taylor, who get a
'chapter' each before Weber drifts on to the next thing to grab his attention,
like a beachcomber ambling along the sands of Montauk - the secluded,
upmarket Long Island enclave where Weber and his canines prefer to frolic.
Some of A
Letter To True's subjects are social/political "issues"
about which the film-maker seems genuinely concerned - the state of America
post-9/11, the plight of Haitian refugees, etc - but his narration is
never anything other than a gentle, slightly soft-headed, naive, child-like
ramble. Needless to say, the sprawling mess of a confection that results
won't be to everybody's tastes, and there's certainly no shortage of trite,
naive juxtapositions along the way.
It does feels
mean to criticise Weber, however - to do so feels rather like scolding
one of his puppies, tail-wagging and desperate to please. And in these
days when American non-fiction film tends to fall squarely into the investigative,
confrontational Michael Moore
/ Morgan Spurlock camp,
it's perhaps quite healthy that such a different kind of voice can still
be heard - even if it is that of a multi-millionaire who's cobbled together
an ornately decadent soapbox out of flimsy celluloid.
7th September,
2004
(seen 20th August : Filmhouse Edinburgh : public show - Edinburgh
Film Festival)
click
HERE for our full coverage of the 58th Edinburgh Film Festival
by Neil
Young
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