A lot of articles and reviews about the new American documentary Catfish will contain some form of the disclaimer that 'The less you know about it beforehand, the better'. It's true that this suspenseful, fascinating and heart-wrenching film gains a lot of currency from the trump cards it keeps tucked up its sleeve until the most opportune moment.
In truth, it doesn't take a genius to work out even from a suitably vague synopsis that it's a film in which everything is not as it seems. It starts out as a sweet and funny document of the long-distance, online romance between a young man, Yaniv Schulman, and a 19-year-old dancer named Megan. Gradually it turns into ... something else.
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'It's not a horror movie, but there are scary parts. It's not a comedy but there are funny parts. It might make you cry. It's hard to talk about', says Henry Joost, co-director of the film with Yaniv's brother, Ariel. 'The film is about an experience we had, and part of that is that we never knew where it was headed. That's the best way to see the movie.'
Suffice it to say that the film manages to be at once a cautionary tale and a poignant tribute to the power and authenticity of online relationships. It interrogates the methods of selectivity and fabrication that can be involved in the creation of online personas, but also reveals how deep and genuine virtual relationships can be.
'Niv doesn't regret anything that happened,' says Ariel Schulman. 'If a "virtual relationship" affects you emotionally, then it's not virtual at all.
'A lot of people say they've committed Facebook suicide [the phenomenon of deleting one's Facebook profile in one fell swoop] since seeing the film,' he adds. 'Even I've scaled back. But it doesn't mean I'm not open to meeting the love of my life on Facebook ... You can't just close yourself off, because that is the way people connect.'
The almost total integration of 'real' and 'virtual' worlds in contemporary Western society is reinforced visually in Catfish, through the use of Google Earth and other graphic online interfaces to transition between scenes and physical locations, effectively weaving these disparate fabrics into a seamless garment.
'A lot of the story takes place online,' says Schulman. 'Basically Niv was in love with someone who lived really far away. A lot of their relationship was through the internet. So when it came