Forbidden Lies: 100 minutes. Rated: M. Director: Anna Broinowski. Starring: Norma Khouri
The title is apt, for this is a documentary about lies. Not just the big lies, canny 'sells' and half-truths piled up by its notorious heroine, author and confessed literary fraud Norma Khouri. It's equally concerned with more ingrained forms of lying — the way media spin facts into versions of the truth, or how writers (and documentary filmmakers, for that matter) employ artistic licence in order to carry their particular cause.
Khouri is a fascinating subject, whose offences are well documented. In 2001 she published a book called Forbidden Love, which purported to detail the case of a close Jordanian friend who was killed by her family for falling in love with a Christian. Astute journos and experts in Middle Eastern culure have long since debunked any claim to factuality that the purportedly non-fiction book made. But this was only after the compelling subject matter and Khouri's own charisma helped propel it onto international bestseller lists.
Despite the patently erroneous geographical and cultural details in the book, and the lies and half-truths Khouri has since told about her own life in order to help sell the story, she maintains to this day that the book is essentially true — that she did have a close friend who fell victim to an honour killing. She also insists that her motivation has always been to put pressure on the Jordanian government to change laws that protect the perpetrators of honour killings — an honourable cause on her part, despite dubious means.
You want to believe her. You really do. So does Broinowski, who breaks out of the director's traditional objective position and becomes a character in her own film, travelling with Khouri to Jordan to allow her the chance to prove herself on camera. Still Khouri proves elusive. The tension between her and the frustrated filmmaker is palpable.
Khouri is caught conning so often that it becomes difficult to believe anything she says. It is fascinating to listen to her subtly change her story or revise her own words in order to cover holes in her testimony. She rarely misses a beat. If she's lying, she does so eloquently. One expert talking head in the documentary suggests she's a pathological liar. She's certainly a liar — the question is, how big a liar?
Broinowski experiments with traditional documentary structure to