There Are No Fakes review — a fake painting that hid a world of real horror
It centred on Kevin Hearn, the guitarist and keyboard player with a kindly face from the Barenaked Ladies who in 2005 spent $20,000 on what he was told was a Norval Morrisseau painting, a green and snakey thing which I actually quite liked so it shows what I know. But it was a fake so he sued the seller. I admit that $20,000 is $19,950 more than I have ever spent on art, but we’re hardly talking a stolen Picasso are we? It seemed relatively small potatoes.
Yet as so often, I was wrong. Because even though this film was too long and repetitive and could have shed 30 minutes’ flab, it was a rolling snowball that got bigger and bigger and darker and darker, holding back twists that were worthy of Fargo until it stopped as a giant, stinking boulder. This was a masterclass in controlled storytelling.
For the first half it seemed as if we were just diving down a rabbit hole of dodgy dealers, seedy auctioneers and Del Boy “experts” who seemed like joke figures, if a little menacing (one said he would like to shoot a man who accused him of dealing in fakes).
Yes, there was the ugly truth that here was a dead indigenous artist being exploited by a bunch of greedy white men, his legacy diluted by mass-produced tat, but no one had died. Morrisseau, who struggled with alcohol addiction, was surrounded by shady, exploitative figures and died of Parkinson’s in 2007.
Yet towards the end came a descent into something more sinister than I could have imagined when we started in a small art gallery. If you haven’t seen it yet don’t read on, but this was a world of serial, grotesque rape and extreme violence. Two rape survivors, Dallas and Amanda, gave their astonishing testimonies with an understatement that only heightened the atrociousness. This was not a film about art fakery at all; it was about the shameless horror of human greed.
