Catfish

Thursday 27th January 2011
Upstairs at the Prince Charles Cinema

Fact or Fiction? is not normally a question a documentary filmmaker would want his audience to be asking as they come out of the cinema but in the case of Catfish it is a valid, if ultimately irrelevant, question. Directed by film students Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, this contemporary tale of deception, love and betrayal treads a fine line between the acceptable and absurd in keeping with it's subject's own weakness in life - Facebook. Nev, a New York photographer strikes up a relationship with the seemingly attractive Megan, whose sister has sent him a painting of his well published photograph. Their relationship is established first online and then through endless amount of phonecalls between the pair, calls that will take on a cringeworthy, side-splittingly funny role as the story progresses. As the relationship progresses Nev utilises a number technological devices in a bid to discover more about his new found romance. The camera zooms around Google Earth outlining the physical distance between the two, Google Street reveals the house Megan lives in to Nev amongst other more revelatory finds whilst the pairs Facebook messages are shot in stark close-ups filling the cinema screen with bright computer light.

All is not as it appears though and as Nev along with his two director friends decide to take a visit to see Megan, the films slip into a dark realm that threatens to tip towards a harrowing conclusion but eventually becomes a story of understanding and forgiveness in the face of the betrayal. The film provides no answers to the problems Nev faces rather provides understanding to the dangers of social interaction through forms such as Facebook. As Peter Bradshaw recently noted The Social Network 'shrewdly suggested that Facebook's popularity lies in allowing its users to regulate their contact with other people, to present and manipulate an image of themselves in ways previously available only to celebrities' and indeed Catfish is the harrowing after-thought of this notion. 1 How much of this documentary is true to life is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. Go and see this for it's honesty, it's humour and most of all its moral value in this the new digital age of Facebook.

____________________
1 Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 16th December 2010

IMDB / Find Any Film / Rotten Tomatoes / Trailer