It has long been the immodest contention of this column that the changing relationship between escapism and realism is becoming the defining issue for modern cinema. Movies have always idealised their subjects, but the digitisation of the filmic process, the triumph of the Iranian para-realist directors, and the rhetorical challenge of Lars von Trier's Danish movement Dogme - all of which took place in the late 1980s to mid-1990s - as well as the more recent revival of pure documentary, constitute a cinematic reorientation towards the real which is unparalleled in film history. The naturalist directors of the 1920s didn't have anything like the same impact, nor even, arguably, did the Italian neo-realists or the cin?ma verit? movement of the early 1960s. Peter Jackson's jokey campaigning for what he called the "f-word" - fantasy - at the recent Oscars shows that even the director of the Lord of the Rings films knows how much realism is making the running in 21st-century filmmaking.
Cinephiles should be delighted. The technological, aesthetic and audience barriers which have for years dogged the movie world seem to be melting away. A new candid cinema of the unfeigned and the raw is the result.
Its trump card is its ability to astonish and its latest exemplar will do just that. Andrew Jarecki's documentary Capturing the Friedmans won the grand jury prize at Sundance 2003 and electrified the festival circuit thereafter. A detailed portrait of the breakdown of an apparently normal, if somewhat exhibitionist, Long Island Jewish family, it is certain to become a talking point when it is finally released in Britain in April. Its subject matter - the father Arnold's paedophilia, the possibility that he abused his son Jesse, the allegations that together they then sexually assaulted boys in Arnold's computer class - alone is the stuff of tabloid headlines. But when you throw in the fact that eldest son David is New York's most successful birthday party clown and, most remarkably, that the Friedmans filmed the twists and turns in their fortunes - particularly, with inexplicable good humour, the awful bits - the fascination becomes understandable.
Its relevance to the broader question about realism in modern cinema becomes clear when it is compared to another award-winning film about paedophilia, Clint Eastwood's Mystic River. Eastwood is old school and his movie is about the damage and violence which flows through subsequent generations when a child is abused. Its seriousness and grandeur impressed many in the film world, as its recent Oscars for Sean Penn and Tim Robbins show. Others were concerned not only by the fact that Penn's and particularly Robbins's performances were actually rather awkward, but also that Eastwood's interest in moral archetype, and entertainment cinema's tendency to classicise story norms, seriously reduced the film's ability to deal with the messy realities of abuse. It felt, rather, like one of those 1950s problem pictures - concerned but aloof.
What makes Capturing the Friedmans, by contrast, an outstanding work of (documentary) film is that it not only has room for the spiky, ambiguous bits of paedophile cases, but seems to find dignity in them. It does this in two ways. Firstly, flaunting the traditions of neatness in movie storytelling, it undergoes no fewer than seven consecutive narrative transformations: first it is a character study of an abuser, then a miscarriage of justice tale which segues into a surreal family portrait, then an account of an extraordinary psycho-history involving a 13 year old having sex with his 8-year-old brother, then a campaigning piece about false memory syndrome, then an anti-oedipal narrative where Dad is beloved and Mom is the villain, then an essay on filial imperviousness to truth, then an account of the competence, or otherwise, of a sex crime unit. Each contains revelations; each is undercut with comedy.
Secondly, its characters are far more unusual than those in fictional cinema. Arnold plays "Heaven, I'm in Heaven, and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak..." on the piano the night before he begins his sentence for 90 cases of sexual assault. Normal character expectations are thwarted. One of the few victims prepared to speak to director Jarecki gives perhaps the least believable interview in the film. And one of the sex crime professionals makes the alarming assertion that you have to interview a possibly abused child by telling them what happened. Jesse is videoed singing and dancing on the courtroom steps just hours after he has been sentenced, aged 19, to six to 18 years in prison. Many films have dealt with child abuse (the issue's arc of horrific revelation is almost generic) yet none until Capturing the Friedmans has captured it in the round. And none would dare take as its main character a clown-paedophile-videographer-escapist.
To contrast Mystic River and the Friedmans film reveals a vital point: since new candid cinema respects the surrealism of the truth and the messiness of real life, it could play a crucial role in the continuing maturation of film. If Capturing the Friedmans does well at the box office, its honesty may prove infectious and, as a result, well-meaning movies such as Mystic River will engage, in the future, more vitally with their subject.
