SFF NOTES: Kate Plays Christine (2015, Dir. Robert Greene)

There is something definitely awry with Robert Greene’s unconventional documentary feature treatment of the death of public television presenter Christine Chubbuck, who killed herself live on air in 1974. Something uncharitable even. As if Greene and his mouthpiece, actress Kate Lyn Sheil, want to judge their film’s audience on terms that they don't hold themselves to.

In order to get a seemingly less exploitative angle on the admittedly shocking cultural happening (the event was the kicking off point for Sidney Lumet’s Network, which itself reverberated through films as recent as Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler - Chubbuck’s last words on air were, "In keeping with Channel 40's policy of bringing you the latest in 'blood and guts', and in living colour, you are going to see another first—attempted suicide" – you see the through-line), Greene focuses on the acting process. He sends a self-effacing Kate Lyn Sheil out to Florida to research Chubbuck’s life in preparation for playing her in an upcoming feature film (though pointedly not the Antonio Campos directed Christine, which premiered along with this at Sundance this year).

Sheil treads through Florida talking with people who worked at WXLT-TV (though decades after Chubbuck’s death), with the owner of the gun shop where Chubbuck bought her revolver (though it had since moved and the owner wasn’t there until comparatively recently), she visits Chubbuck’s house (which has surely housed scores of tenants since her death), discusses interpretation with other actors on the project, basically she talks with nobody who knew Chubbuck even tangentially, at least not till very late in the piece. The premise of the whole exercise is to examine how we can truly do a person justice if we don’t have anything to go by. This eventually extends to a hunt for footage of Chubbuck and from there to a supposed desire on the audience’s part to see the footage of the suicide itself, which has been hidden away since it went live to air.

The issue for me in all this is that Greene has built his thinly veiled Haneke-inflected camera flip without sticking to his own rules. If we are being pressed to examine our motivations for attending the film (which are probably misinterpreted by Greene in most cases), then surely Greene himself should examine his motivations for opening up the story again if he can’t do Chubbuck’s experience any justice. The examination is clearly a pretence from the beginning (What production sends their lead actress to carry out investigations without any input from what the screenwriter or director has already discovered?) and the actual production-within-a-production is embarrassingly melodramatic, certainly not the deep character examination Sheil had been putting about.

With the film’s disingenuous nature coming more and more to the foreground, the climactic death scene, which (again disingenuously) gives the film its purpose, cannot help but ring hollow. Not only does it undercut Greene’s grandstanding but it invalidates the few insights Sheil shared into the acting process itself.

Seriously misguided stuff.

★★

Kate Plays Christine screened as part of the Sydney Film Festival 2016.

You can check out other films from the festival here.