The Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho's Playing is an experimental documentary that sounds like a dumb stunt but plays as a fascinating study in the nature of acting and storytelling. The movie opens with the text of an ad Coutinho placed in the newspaper that amounted to an open call for any women in Rio de Janeiro over eighteen "with stories to tell." He filmed them talking about their lives and then brought in a succession of actresses, who studied these monologues and then, using their own words, delivered their own versions of the stories. The trick is that in the finished film, Coutinho cut together the best of both material-- the original speakers and the actresses doing their "interpretations" of them-- without clearly identifying for the audience which is which. Sometimes a scene will end with a woman revealing herself to be an actress by commenting on what she's just done; sometimes, as in the case of a woman who talks about how she sees her relationship with her grown daughter reflected in Finding Nemo, we get to see the original speaker's words alongside those of the actress who "plays" them; sometimes we never find out. At its simplest, the movie reveals a lot about "real life" and theater and how they complement and comment on each other. (A number of the women who seem to be describing their own experiences tear up very easily. However, an actress shows the director the tool she would have used if he'd insisted that she cry during her performance and explains that though she was prepared to use it, she preferred not to because it's her observation that when people really feel like crying, that's when they hold back their tears.) It also shows how thin the line between the two can be. Coutinho has taken a device that could have been used to cook up one more dopey illusion vs. reality game and made something substantial with it.
Another documentary in the festival, Theater of War, is also meant to be about theater and its application to the real world, which is here defined as torn-from-the-headlines big issues. Thinking about how the movie defines theater sort of makes my head hurt. The director, John Walter, made How to Draw a Bunny, an ugly-looking but endlessly fascinating video documentary about the prankster pop artist Ray Johnson. Theater, a behind-the-scenes look at a 2006 Public Theater production of Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, is much slicker-looking and about half as interesting. The material about Brecht's life and the writing and original production of the play is enough to make you think it would be great to see a real documentary about that sometime, preferably one that's less slavish in its worship of the playwright and that manages to get by without the contributions of this film's resident Brecht scholar, Jay Cantor, a man who has the rare distinction of having written bad novels about both Che Guevara and Krazy Kat. But the film's prime attraction is supposed to be the chance to see the Public Theater production coming together and to see a glimpse of the "process" of its star, Meryl Streep.
Streep comes across as a very nice woman, and she gets points for allowing herself to be filmed at rehearsals wearing a T-shirt that says "DIVA" across the front, but the big unanswered question raised by Theater of War is why this production was made. When the Public Theater's artistic director tells the camera that the Iraq war is an all-encompassing issue like the Vietnam war, and that he just knew he had to put on "an adaptation" of Mother Courage by Tony Kushner starring Meryl Streep, it just sounds as if he's saying that, in order to appear to be saying something about an important contemporary subject, he just had to have the biggest New York playwright to whom he had access custom-design a big classic play that could seem to be commenting on the subject, with the Official Big New York Stage Actress in the lead. Nothing that comes after that really dispels this impression, whether it's seeing the composer who's been hired to compose new songs in a sort of Brecht-Weill tailor them to the singing abilities of the stars, or the costume designer explain that she's throwing together styles of dress from many different periods and cultures so as not to appear to be commenting on any specific time or place, or watching the prop guys deliver on the director George C. Wolfe's passionate desire to have a jeep that can be driven onstage. (The Public Theater Mother Courage finally opened to loud hype and mixed reviews, with a "translation" by Kushner that included sitcom snappers and lines directed at the Bush administration.) The biggest shocker in the movie comes very early, when Tony Kushner, talking about his early years in New York in the mid-seventies as a theater student from Lousiana, and how he was able to feed his culture jones seeing things like the celebrated Public Theater production of The Threepenny Opera with Raul Julia and Ellen Greene and the whole of Wagner's Ring cycle "for no money." (There were gasps in the audience.) The subtext of Theater of War is the story of how some gifted people who were able to learn their craft and make their names in the last years when New York was affordable for young artists now collaborate, probably with the best of intentions, in the work of maintaining the illusion that this rich man's playground of a city is still a vital culture center by staging effects-heavy, glitzy shows whose point seems to be that Bertolt Brecht had George W. Bush's number. The punchline is that the Tony Kushner of 1975 might not be able to get into these shows, and to his credit, he might not want to.