The British underground graffiti artist Banksy splashed into the Sundance Film Festival on the opening weekend, leaving his distinctive tags in a couple of places, and while he was there the international man of mystery dropped off his first film, “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” which has drawn largely ecstatic reaction from writers but has yet to find a U.S. distributor.
The documentary is more or less three films in one: for half an hour or so, it’s about the L.A. street art scene as filmed by an obsessive Frenchman and vintage-clothing dealer named Thierry Guetta, who is making a documentary. There is a lot of exhilarating footage of shadowy figures like “Space Invader” (whose thing is to lovingly craft mosaic imitating the cartoony characters of the 1970s video game and then glue them to walls and public works) doing their thing under cover of night, and Guetta’s connection to these artists draws the attention of Banksy himself. Banksy, after years of posting tongue-in-cheek murals like one of two Brit policemen kissing, has become a massive celebrity in the UK, and his works are auctioned off for hundreds of thousands of pounds. When he went to the Middle East to paint on a West Bank wall, Brit tabloids naturally dubbed him “West Banksy.”
I enjoyed each of these two parts of the film (though we don’t really get to know much about Banksy, whose face and voice are obscured during interviews) but the third part left me with a taste of ashes. Banksy (or so he says; the whole film playfully questions its own accuracy) encouraged Thierry Guetta to drop his project to make a street-art documentary and become an artist himself. Guetta does, and while putting together the most shamelessly derivative exhibition of sub-Warholian ironized pop culture (a giant iconic silk screen-ish portrait of Elvis with a toy machine gun replacing a guitar; celebrity pictures altered with Monroe-style blond wigs; a giant spray paint can done up a la Warhol as a Campbell’s tomato soup can) Guetta grabs the attention of the press, museumgoers and even buyers who snap up this dreadful dreck to the tune of $1 million.
Guetta is such a barnacle on the world of creativity that seeing him succeed is irritating, and the droll tone of the earlier segments of the film (perhaps the best scene of which is a mock-thriller escapade in which Guetta is questioned by Disneyland authorities after filming a typical Banksy gag — depositing a life-sized blowup doll done up to look like a Gitmo Bay prisoner in the line of sight of passengers on one of Disney’s Olde West trains) gives way a sort of shrug of disgust at Guetta’s glib antics. Because of its Banksy association, “Exit Through the Gift Shop” is bound to win a lot of media attention, but ultimately it’s not about Banksy and it’s a bit of a disappointment.
