The Sundance Film Festival (January 23-February 2) includes an Indian production in its World Cinema Dramatic Competition section – Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s Sabar Bonda – and a host of documentaries.
Two titles in the non-fiction category play with real-life expectations as well as filmmaking conventions. While Zodiac Killer Project is a meta-examination of the true crime show, The Dating Game looks at Chinese men hunting for romantic partners.
Zodiac Killer Project: A playful post mortem
Filmmaker Charlie Shackleton is not alone in his fascination for the unidentified serial killer known as the Zodiac, who operated in San Francisco in 1968 and 1969. There have been far too many shows and films about the man who remains the subject of an open investigation. The obsession with nabbing the Zodiac was itself the theme of David Fincher’s well-received fiction feature Zodiac (2007).
Shackleton too might have notched up a contribution to the Zodiac sub-genre if he had managed to get the rights to one of the many books on the subject. He didn’t – but he made a film anyway. The result is an inventive and thoughtful meta-documentary about the very form of the true crime show.
Zodiac Killer Project begins at a parking lot where, several decades before, San Francisco police officer Lyndon E Lafferty laid eyes on the man he suspected was the Zodiac. Told to ignore George Russel Tucker as a suspect, Lafferty conducted an unsanctioned investigation, which resulted in the book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge in 2012.
In Shackleton’s film, the parking lot is the first of several blank, static spaces onto which the filmmaker projects his takedown of true crime shows. Through lengthy shots of surfaces – walls, tables, the facades of buildings – as well as carefully selected clips from popular true crime shows, Shackleton dissects the lazy cliches associated with this gruesome type of entertainment.
Shackleton’s droll commentary unpacks the typical elements of true crime – the re-enactments, the opening montage that is edited like a trailer and that “doesn’t really tell you anything but gives you the general vibe”, the “country-inflected music but with a dark edge”. Overly dramatised narratives and the pat performativeness of subjects point to the ethical slipperiness of such shows.
Shackleton’s own occasional use of re-enactments suggests a subtle tribute to Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988), which inventively harnessed true crime conventions to revisit a miscarriage of justice. But there is more than playfulness at work in Zodiac Killer Project.
Shackleton, who has also edited the 91-minute documentary, is not just carrying out an elegant post-mortem of the true crime genre. Zodiac Killer Project questions the very notion of truth in non-fiction.
Absence – of information, gimmicks, predictable beats – becomes a powerful tool to examine the manipulativeness of a kind of storytelling so commonplace that its workings barely merit attention. As Shackleton demonstrates, a witty voiceover talking over an empty table can be equally impactful – and revealing. True crime will never die, but Zodiac Killer Project ensures that the genre will not be seen in the same way again.
The Dating Game: Chinese whispers
Violet Du Feng’s The Dating Game follows Chinese dating coach Hao and three of his clients through a seven-day exercise in securing companionship. Unlucky in love and desperate for partners, the three men have flocked to Hao for a makeover of body and soul.
The Chongqing resident is brimming with hop tips. Try a naughtier tone while messaging women, Hao tells his inhibited clients. If a woman comments on other women, it is a trap, Hao declares.
The three men might be unwillingly single, but they have not discarded their scepticism. They push back against Hao’s advice on smooth talk and dressing up social media profiles, and question whether “being nice is no use” where dating is concerned.
Further doubt over the efficacy of Hao’s methods, some of which appear outright dubious, is supplied by his wife Wen. She too is a dating coach, but she has an approach that contradicts Hao’s recommendation to fake it till you make it.
The context for the 90-minute documentary is China’s decades-long one-child policy, which has resulted in far too many men and not enough women to go around. The Chinese economic miracle has also contributed to families too busy earning a living to train their children in the social skills needed to find partners, the film suggests.
India’s arranged marriage culture comes off as wise, necessary and even a healthy antidote to a widespread malaise of loneliness. Although The Dating Game does not delve too deeply into the cultural forces that are driving men to seek professional intervention, the film does provides rare glimpses into aspirational youth culture as well as the prevailing gender dynamic.
The chasm between male and female desire is evident when some of the women interviewed for the film confess that they derive greater satisfaction from virtual avatars than from real men.
The scenes of Hao egging on his clients to approach random women on the street might have been sad if the film did not have a breezy, light-hearted tone. Violet Du Feng’s empathy for her subjects helps paper over the not entirely convincing neatness with which she tackles the travails of the unhappy trio, or even the relationship between Hao and Wen.
Also read:
In Marathi film ‘Sabar Bonda’, the forbidden fruit of gay love
