Thin line of interrogation – Weekend
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Errol Morris’s The Pigeon Tunnel, a documentary about John le Carre, an unconventional biopic in which one of the best British writers of the 20th century talks to one of the best American documentarians, a Goethe Medal winner talks to an Oscar winner, is out on Apple TV, and both are not at all interested in the truth.
Who is John Le Carré? A great British writer, thinker, author of great, without exaggeration, spy novels, the best of the twentieth century. Who is David Cornwell? A boy who was abandoned by his mother when he was five, a boy whose father was a cheerful swindler, a boy who grew up to become a spy and then a writer, John Le Carré.
Who is Errol Morris? A classic documentary filmmaker, the author of wild films in which the music of Philip Glass tells a story that goes against the visuals, and the reconstruction somehow turns out to be more accurate than reality.
From this question – “Who are you?” – begins Errol Morris’s film The Pigeon Tunnel, an hour and a half conversation with David Cornwell, not at all like a biopic. “Who you are? – the writer asks the director. “I am familiar with your works, sometimes you are a ghost, sometimes you are a god, and sometimes you are present in the film.” This question is important to Cornwell because, as he explains with disarming alacrity, interviewing is a performance art and you need to understand who you’re speaking to. What does the interviewer want to achieve?
Is it possible, after such an introduction, to hope that from this interview the viewer will learn the truth about the life of David Cornwell or at least John Le Carré?
Oh yeah. A splinter of an empire, a powerful 88-year-old man, David Cornwell is serious and good-natured, he speaks even better than he writes, he thinks quickly, and there is not for a second the feeling that he wants to hide anything or set Errol Morris on the wrong trail. Only occasionally does he allow himself to grin – in the most unexpected places, most often at the beginning of a phrase that is completely inconducive to a grin. He talks about how to conduct an interrogation (he learned this while working for British intelligence). He talks about his father, a petty swindler, a gambler, an endlessly charming schemer who felt good only when he was on the verge of disaster – and the details multiply, reaching the arms trade and a fight with David in a Viennese hotel restaurant. He talks about espionage and what pushes spies – and indeed the human race in general – to betrayal and whether there is an innate craving for this, as, for example, in the spy Kim Philby, a double agent who fled to the USSR. He talks about himself – about how all his life he ran away from reality into imagination and was engaged in the reconstruction of chaos. How I tried to discover the great secret of human nature – but realized that there was no secret. He talks about truth – about some objective truth that will be visible not to the participants in the event, but to a “third party.” “God?” – Morris clarifies. “Someone records the facts, but we will never see the report,” explains Cornwell, who is adept at writing reports, patiently.
Cornwell claims that he wanted to call almost every novel “The Pigeon Tunnel.” The pigeons were bred on the roof of the casino in Monte Carlo, where his father once brought teenage David. There was something like a sports club where members could shoot pigeons: the birds were released from cages into a tunnel, they flew out of it just to the place where the gentlemen with guns stood. The surviving pigeons returned to their home cages – where else? – and this whole story was repeated again and again.
Cornwell is not just charming, smart, ironic. Irresistible. He’s not just telling tales that are sometimes frightening, sometimes meaningless, sometimes startlingly relevant, he’s retelling his collection of memoirs called, yes, “The Pigeon Tunnel.” The film was shot in 2019, a year before the hero’s death, but it is not perceived as a summing up of the life of David Cornwell. Rather, Morris is trying to sum up his own results, to make the perfect Errol Morris film. As if illustrating the main metaphor of the film, he continually returns to his usual cage: he once revolutionized the idea of documentary cinema by filming “The Thin Blue Line,” based not only on interviews with the characters, but also on film reconstruction of eyewitness testimony. That film helped free an innocent man from prison. Now he is also – to the music of the same Philip Glass – filming the life of David Cornwell: pigeons in a tunnel, or an anecdote about Rudolf Hess’s pants, which lie in the secret main safe of MI6, or the story in which little David waves to his father from the street , and he waves back at him from the prison window (this could not have happened, notes Cornwell, who himself told this story). Morris, who once worked as a private detective, is always looking for inconsistency, a contrast between how the hero sees himself and who he really is; there is nothing to look for here, his hero is a double agent. A man with his own chaotic and inaccurate memories – and a writer who gives form to chaos.
Morris never appears on camera, but his presence is felt: sometimes he asks questions, sometimes he comments. “History is chaos!” – he suddenly screams off-screen. Cornwell agrees. Or, when Cornwell talks about how he followed the left as an Oxford student, joined the university communist club and was forced to watch Battleship Potemkin six times at the Soviet embassy, Morris says wistfully in voiceover: “It’s a good movie.” Good, yes, Cornwell agrees, but there is no happy ending.
“The Pigeon Tunnel” is also a film without a happy ending; it promises a conversation about politics and history, but delivers stories about the romance of fraud. It seems either an adaptation of Faust or pure tomfoolery. It deceives the viewer with every plot twist, every reconstruction, every answer, every unasked question.
It’s actually a movie in which an 88-year-old former military investigator talks to a 70-year-old former private detective about betrayal, how history is chaos, and how we’re all just birds being shot at by someone. objective third party. Those who survived return to their home cell, and everything starts all over again.
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