Guerrilla street artist Banksy’s debut documentary feature may be called “Exit Through the Gift Shop” but it’s really more of a cinematic trapdoor.
To explain: the film opens in a somewhat biographical manner. We’re introduced, via narration by a wryly clued-in Rhys Ifans, to Frenchman Thierry Guetta. Guetta is, more or less, a madman. He’s the owner of a too-cool-for-school vintage clothing store in Los Angeles and an obsessive videographer, first filming his family and friends and then, after discovering his cousin is a Parisian street artist called Space Invader, taking on the role as unofficial documentarian of the street art movement. He first filmed people like Space Invader and Shepard Fairey (he of the ‘Obey’ stickers and immortal Obama campaign poster) as they sneakily put up their art under cover of darkness. Guetta’s footage is undeniably compelling, capturing these marginalized artists with a you-are-there immediacy, but Guetta as a character is even better; a bumbling, stumbling, hairy little hanger on. The fact that he looks and acts like the lovechild of Ron Jeremy and Pepe le Pew is just icing on the cake.
Soon, Guetta is invited into the inner sanctum of Banksy, the mysterious, hilarious British guerrilla artist who know one has really seen or heard (in the movie his interviews show him with a blacked-out face and his voice distorted like he’s in the Witness Protection Program) but whose work (hanging phony artwork in the Louvre, leaving a butchered phone booth in the middle of London) is widely acknowledged. Banksy is Guetta’s holy grail and, once he gets the go-ahead, begins to detail the artist’s life even more compulsively, all the while following Banksy’s strict precautions — always staying behind him, never showing his face, etc. In one great scene, Banksy takes Guetta into his London workshop, exposing boxes upon boxes of money, with Princess Diana’s face replacing the Queen’s. He charmingly admits that, after handing out a few of the fake bills at a concert (and they started to circulate), he realized it might be a bad idea to pass the money out. He had printed 3 million pounds worth and could go to jail for a long, long time.
It’s in this scene that we get a picture of the real Banksy, even without seeing or hearing him. With his guard down he shows us who he really is — a brilliant prankster, artist and provocateur but one who is, in the end, only interested in the gag if it’s all in good fun.
One of the greatest things about “Exit Through the Gift Shop” is that its a constantly morphing narrative. Fifteen minutes out and you’ll have no idea where it’ll be in the next fifteen minutes. Like Banksy’s best artwork, it’s forever shifting, sharply critiquing, and wildly entertaining. In this middle section we get to see priceless footage of Banksy’s art installation in Los Angeles, where an elephant painted in children’s facepaint proudly walked the room, and in Disneyland, where he caused a security lockdown thanks to an instillation that uncomfortably brought to mind Guantanamo Bay.
When Banksy suggests to Guetta that he finally do something with all the footage he’s amassed (he literally has thousands of videotapes stacked in his garage), the film that Guetta produces is a literal nightmare, like something you’d see on James Woods’ “Videodrome” channel, an endlessly flickering series of images that Guetta thinks is profound and unnerving but everyone (including Fairey and Banksy) agrees is complete and utter shit. He had taken amazing footage and turned out shit.
So Banksy takes the footage back, which is acknowledged the beginning of the movie but by this point you’ve probably forgotten about that. At the film’s start, Banksy describes it in his usual cutting wit as “A film about a guy who was trying to make a film of me but we made a film of him” (or something to that effect). Banksy’s attitude seems to be (the man, if you can’t tell, isn’t one for introspection) that he can’t make a worse movie than Guetta. As the focus of the movie zeroes in on Guetta himself (ruining this part of the movie would be criminal), the thesis of the film comes into view, one about the commercialization of an artform that gleefully gives the middle finger to the art world establishment. The movie asks the question — if everyone can produce street art, should everyone? In the process, Guetta comes off as the greatest documentary villain since “King of Kong”‘s Billy Mitchell.
“Exit Through the Gift Shop” is just as impish as Banksy’s street art and just as thought provoking. He’s assembled a crack team behind the scenes, too. Besides Ifans he’s got Portishead’s Geoff Barrow to do the glitchy electronic score, assembled a great soundtrack and editors Chris King and Tom Fulford should be given full credit since they keep the movie’s pace sprightly while remaining insightful and dense. Just thinking about the sheer amount of footage they had to wade through, between Guetta and Banksy’s stuff, boggles the mind. And at a svelte 87 minutes, it’s one minute shorter than “Date Movie.”
As the movie’s approached release, many have questioned its authenticity, including a recent New York Times piece. Banksy is, after all, an outre artist who takes great joy in pulling the public’s collective leg (and, really, since he’s cloaked in darkness and his voice distorted, we can’t even be sure that it’s Banksy being interviewed in the film). Why wouldn’t he want to punk us all by buying into a documentary as compelling and insightful as this? Well, we guess that could be true. If Guetta isn’t the real deal, then he’s the most fully formed fictional character we’ve probably seen this year. And furthermore, whether or not “Exit Through the Gift Shop” is a fiendishly clever hoax doesn’t really matter. It raises pointed questions about the nature of art in the 21st century and does so in a consistently entertaining and often hilarious way. If you wonder how puckish graffiti artists can be co-opted and ripped off, then this is the documentary for you.
It’s the rare movie that keeps twisting and turning in on itself to the point that whether you know what’s real or not, what’s right or wrong, won’t really matter. You’re having too much fun to care. As a conversation piece as well as a movie, it doesn’t get much better than “Exit Through the Gift Shop.”[A]