To anyone unfamiliar with the story of artist Ai Weiwei the initial few minutes of this documentary will be confusing. However, patient viewing will be rewarded with the realization that director Andreas Johnsen is relating, in stark cinéma vérité style, the latest battle in a very old conflict between the right to exercise imagination and the State. Since 2008, when the horrid aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake (i.e. see the upcoming post entitled ‘Surviving Martyrdom’) awakened his conscience and transformed him into a vociferous critic of the Communist government, Ai has battled, baited, taunted, mocked, ridiculed the veiled (and overt) authoritarianism, bureaucratic incompetence, and hypocrisy he sees around him. He has continued to make Duchamp-styled art around these fertile subjects and to employ deft use of social media and his own celebrity to draw attention to the system's inherent absurdities.
Johnsen’s film is a companion piece to Alison Klayman’s 2012 ‘Never Sorry,’ itself an excellent introduction to the artist and his times, and the first of a series of programs (‘The Crab House,’ ‘Ai Weiwei’s Appeal’), which when watched in sequence provides a single narrative record of a man's often quixotic struggle against a governmental machine determined to suppress his voice and wear him down. For it's part, 'The Fake Case' takes up the story in 2011, after Ai had been “disappeared” for 81 days by the authorities who, upon his sudden release, essentially placed him under enforced house arrest. Forbidden to leave the country, or speak to the press, Ai wanders the roomy confines of his sprawling studio cum residence compound alternating between bouts of creativity and angst, all the while still managing to find ways to tweak the brutish authorities.
Under close surveillance (which he himself once mocked by setting up a 24/7 video feed in his bedroom), Ai strolls about the parking lot of a park (so he can see who is following him) in exercise, plays affectionately with his young son, speaks with journalists and lawyers and supervises several works in progress. It is an otherwise innocuous routine, given an underlying tension by the ever-constant implications of constant surveillance and potential incarceration (or worse).
Fake is the actual name of Ai’s studio, itself a pun on the uneasy tensions inherent in modern contemporary art (“Is it REALLY a work of art?”) and is employed in the documentary’s title, implying that the authorities never really had a case to begin with. As the camera prowls around the artist from dawn till dusk of each day, Ai is presented unvarnished in a melancholic style similar to his own video work. He does not sleep well, suffers from occasional memory loss, and is worried about the relentless stress and effects of incarceration on his health. Though physically ursine in appearance, radiating personal magnetism and charisma, Ai gives the very real impression of a man being slowly ground down by state harassment. What ultimately transforms him into a sympathetic figure is not so much his cryptic artwork, or his efforts at protests, but a sense of boyish, even impish humour that pokes out at unexpected moments. This the truest measure of his resilience.
This is probably the most accessible portrayal of Ai in documentary form. Neither a critical appraisal of his work nor a polemic on dissidence, ‘The Fake Case’s’ simple, no-nonsense format works well in its favour. In contrast to the occasional bravado, even bombast of previous, almost hagiographical chronicles about Ai Weiwei, we are offered time in the company of a very human man struggling to make it through each day. And that's what makes it worth watching.