The Illusion (2009) User Reviews

The Illusion

[EdgarST · 2/10 · 7 May 2017]

I have my reservations about the documentary thesis by which graduate Susana Barriga obtained her degree in the International School of Film and TV in Cuba, for ethical reasons and, to a lesser degree, aesthetic. On the aesthetic side, it was a challenge to watch the film because the image was an anti-cinematic square, product of registering at any cost (that is, in a clandestine way) an unfortunate encounter of the filmmaker and her long lost father… or "disencounter", as it turned out to be. From the ethical side, I think Susana was not "loyal to her old man"... even if he seemed to her a villain. I confess that one of the formative processes that most marked me in my life was the direct cinema workshop I took at Ateliers Varan, under the precepts of Jean Rouch and - indirectly – Michel Brault, heirs of the classic tradition of open and frank approach to the subjects of our documentaries. From my vision, Barriga's father seems a poor paranoid and lonely man, who deserved insistence, more forced approaches, more interviews, more honesty, more compassion. David Bradbury declared in an interview that "we must fight our own sense of fidelity and betrayal, inherent in our romantic point of view of our character, and we must not allow that our inevitable disillusionment distance us from our character, or affect our commitment to the documentary, or the spirit of cooperation that should reign in every film". Maybe Susana took the decision to hide the camera and not letting know her father that she was shooting, because she had not the much needed time to discover the insane character into which her father had become. She had an agenda, the intimate story of her family, a story of a deserted home, the absence of a father that she finds living in fear, imagining the Communist Party is watching him, but unfortunately she took a self-pity approach, and forced the documentary into that pitiful direction. I know Susana Barriga has received many accolades and awards for her documentary, but I also know that it is a controversial film that led her to audiovisual silence since 2009.