True Lies

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Movie
German title True Lies
Original title Where the Truth Lies
Country of production Canada ,
United Kingdom ,
United States
original language English
Publishing year 2005
length 108 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
JMK 14
Rod
Director Atom Egoyan
script Atom Egoyan
Rupert Holmes
production Robert Lantos
Sandra Cunningham
Chris Chrisafis
music Mychael Danna
camera Paul Sarossy
cut Susan Shipton
occupation

Wahre Lies (Alternative title: Wahre Lügen - Where the Truth lies, Original title: Where the Truth Lies ) is a drama film from 2005 , which takes place in the United States . Directed by the Canadian-Armenian director Atom Egoyan , who wrote the screenplay together with Rupert Holmes , based on his novel, published two years earlier. Egoyan operates a complex development of the past on two time levels. "His subject is not so much the answer to the question of where the truth lies, but rather a reflection on the pain that can follow the uncovering of the truth."

action

On American television in the 1950s, entertainers Lanny Morris and Vince Collins were very popular with their moderately suggestive manner. Beyond the cameras, they led a dissolute life of luxury, girls and pills. After a telethon in favor of polio- ill children in 1957, Maureen was found dead in the bathtub of her hotel room. The case has not been solved, Lanny and Vince have not been proven to be responsible. Soon after, they separated without the public knowing the circumstances of the breakup. In 1972 Vince closes a business with a publishing company telling stories from his and Lanny's lives for a million. The publishing house sends the young reporter Karen to him.

Karen was one of the children who appeared on the Telethon back then, admires the duo to this day and is convinced of her innocence in the murder case. She runs into Lanny by chance on the plane. Because she knows that he is planning a book himself, she poses as one of her friends to him. They spend a night together, after which Lanny disappears without leaving a message. Karen makes the first interviews with Vince and also seeks out Reuben, who has always accompanied Lanny and Vince as a servant, as well as Maureen's mother. During another visit to Vince, he announces that Lanny is coming for dinner. Karen fails to withdraw in time. Lanny realizes that she has pretended to be a false identity and drives away disappointed. In the evening, Vince gives the reporter intoxicating pills and arranges for her to have lesbian intercourse with a singer. He wants to use the photos he created as leverage so that she doesn't ask probing questions about Maureen and her death. Lanny and Vince had drunk a lot and taken pills the night of the murder. Lanny was sleeping with Maureen in the suite when Vince joined them and tried to get on Lanny. Lanny yelled at him that they were buddies but not lovers, and Vince was devastated. Maureen charged a lot of money for keeping quiet about Vince's sexual orientation. The men fell asleep in different rooms of the suite, in the morning Maureen lay dead on the sofa. But Karen still doesn't know who killed Maureen back then. Vince has since killed himself in said hotel; Reuben offers Karen a tape recorded by Maureen the night before her death for a million. Karen realizes that Reuben had access to the suite at the time and that he killed Maureen - the tape was a kind of old-age insurance for him that could have received money from Vince. In the end, Karen Maureen's mother explains that she knows what happened, but will keep it to herself for the time being out of consideration for people who are still alive. Karen's commentary monologue: "I saw no sign on her face that she suspected that she was the one I was talking about."

Creation and publication

The entertainers Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis acted as loose role models for the characters Lanny and Vince, who abruptly split up. According to critics, the auteur filmmaker Atom Egoyan took a “step into the higher-budgeted cinema equipment” with true lies , shot his “first costume film” with a budget that was many times its previous well-known actors and based on a genre, the neo-noir - thriller .

The filming locations were Newark Airport in Brantford / Ontario , Hollywood and Los Angeles , London and Toronto . Some scenes were filmed in the Stahl House in the mountains above Los Angeles. The house was designed in 1960 as Case Study House No. 22 by the American architect Pierre Koenig . It owes its name not to the steel construction, but to the name of the client, the Stahl couple. Since the property was difficult to access, it was considered unbuildable for a long time and was therefore financially affordable, despite the great location.

True Lies celebrated its world premiere on May 13, 2005 at the Cannes Film Festival . The day of the premiere in the Federal Republic of Germany was February 2, 2006, on July 6, 2006 the film was released on DVD.

Egoyan submitted the film to the MPAA , which gave it an NC-17 rating. It is intended for pornographic films and would only have allowed very limited commercial exploitation. In order to achieve a lower age rating, the director made slight cuts and submitted the work again without the MPAA changing its rating. That is why he brought the film in the uncut version to Cannes and the American cinemas, where the production made very little.

Reviews

Rotten Tomatoes evaluated 95 US reviews of the film on September 1, 2008, which ranks 39 percent. Metacritic sees the film at 47 percent with 29 evaluated reviews.

The judgments of German-speaking critics ranged from praise to rejection. film-dienst critic Rüdiger Suchsland found Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth in their roles "excellent and terribly unfathomable". Much is reminiscent of the film noir , but the story is "less cool and reduced" thanks to the nostalgic paintwork of the larger-than-life melodramas of the 1950s. Suchsland compared the glamor and precision of the film to Mulholland Drive and found visual and atmospheric similarities to Vertigo and Chinatown . The view of the two time levels of the film is "extremely enjoyable and perfectly staged." Fortunately, the Canadian breaks Hollywood rules, according to which a film may show every imaginable violence, but not a bit of sex. Die Welt found that the Canadian director, "previously decried as an enigmatic artist, has made his most commercial film and yet wades knee-deep in his obsessions."

In the Frankfurter Rundschau , Michael Kohler judged that Egoyan had “staged another masterful example of the art of gradual disclosure”. And: “As in all of his films, Egoyan threatens to lose sight of his characters between the time levels and various deceptive maneuvers. Whenever Egoyan keeps the balance between confusion and story, the result is a triumph, if not, one can take off one's hat to the complex construction of his staging in admiration, but one is not drawn into the narrative. ”The taz critic Andreas Busche speculated that it was not so much the sex scenes with the young women that prompted the MPAA to classify it as adult, but rather the addition of the topics of drugs and homosexuality. It is only this that gives the film an interesting, tragic dimension, as Egoyan's best works had. "According to the MPAA's judgment, however, the film must be read a little differently than Egoyan's plan: as a meta-commentary on the bigotry of the American entertainment industry - the present." However, in the US, the critics quickly noticed "that Egoyan's film does not cause a stir justified. "He was" shockingly banal in the breakdown of his traumatic structure. "

Christiane Peitz from Tagesspiegel said that Egoyan lost himself in beautiful outward appearances and was looking for confusion. “The lascivious atmosphere that Atom Egoyan conjured up on the screen in, for example,“ Exotica ”remains a mere surface stimulus this time: an artificial world, enriched by a sometimes smooth, sometimes bombastic, symphonic soundtrack and a veritable confusion of voices from the off. “As a viewer you lose interest in what is happening:“ It doesn't turn into a psychodrama. Just a coolly constructed picture puzzle that doesn't even try to kindle the embers under the ice. "

Awards and nominations

Cannes Film Festival 2005

  • Nominated Golden Palm: Atom Egoyan. The prize went to The Child of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.

Directors Guild of Canada 2006

  • DGC Craft Award in the Outstanding Production Design - Feature Film category for Phillip Barker
  • Nominated in the category Outstanding Direction - Feature Film : Atom Egoyan
  • Nominated for Outstanding Picture Editing - Feature Film : Susan Shipton
  • Nominated DGC Team Award in the Outstanding Feature Film category

Genie Awards 2006

  • Genie in the Best Screenplay category , adapted for Atom Egoyan
  • Nominated in the Best Achievement in Art Direction / Production Design category : Phillip Barker and Carolyn 'Cal' Loucks
  • Nominated for Best Achievement in Editing : Susan Shipton
  • Nominated in the category Best Achievement in Music - Original Score : Mychael Danna
  • Nominated in the category Best Achievement in Overall Sound : Chris Munro, John Hazen and Daniel Pellerin

The German Film and Media Assessment FBW in Wiesbaden awarded the film the rating particularly valuable.

literature

novel

conversations

  • With Atom Egoyan in Tagesspiegel , February 2, 2006: The mystery is reality
  • With Kevin Bacon in the Berliner Zeitung , February 2, 2006, p. K03: At work I love risk

Review mirror

positive

  • film-dienst No. 3/2006, pp. 32–33, by Rüdiger Suchsland: True Lies
  • Die Welt , February 2, 2006, p. 29, by Matthias Heine: Alice in Wonderland

Rather positive

Mixed

Rather negative

  • Die Presse , February 13, 2006, by Christoph Huber: Drug song with rabbit ears in the children's clinic

negative

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ True Lies in the Lexicon of International FilmsTemplate: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used . Retrieved July 15, 2011
  2. ^ Certificate of Release for True Lies . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , January 2006 (PDF; test number: 105 059 K).
  3. ↑ Age rating for True Lies . Youth Media Commission .
  4. ↑ a b c d Rüdiger Suchsland: True Lies . In: film-dienst No. 3/2006
  5. ↑ a b c d Andreas Busche: From trauma to excess . In: taz , February 2, 2006, p. 15
  6. ^ A b Christian Buss: Deadly point of view . In: Spiegel Online , February 2, 2006
  7. ↑ a b Michael Kohler: The Art of Deception . In: Frankfurter Rundschau , February 2, 2006, p. 15
  8. ↑ a b c IMDb , see web links.
  9. ↑ Matthias Heine: Alice in Wonderland . In: Die Welt , February 2, 2006, p. 29
  10. ^ Christiane Peitz: Death in the bathroom . In: Der Tagesspiegel , February 2, 2006