WILDE SALOMÉ

Fascinated by Oscar Wilde’s play, Salomé, Al Pacino takes on the insane task of simultaneously directing a stage version (presented in Los Angeles in 2006), a feature film adaptation (Salomé, released in 2014) and a documentary about the entire process titled Wilde Salomé (completed in 2011). As in Looking for Richard (1996), the actor/director blends fiction, documentary, film and theatre, and the result is a biography of Wilde, a masterful textual analysis and a meditation on cinema. Above all, it’s a film about passion, desire and obsession — Pacino’s creative passion for Wilde and for his craft, Wilde’s provocative passion for words and for his lover, and Salomé’s monstrous passion for John the Baptist. Given the film’s hall of mirrors effect, the true Pacino is never fully revealed. As he argues with his producers and runs out of time and money, he is by turns tyrannical, naïve, self-centred and brilliant. “Everything is acting,” he says, and this intellectual making-of film is perhaps itself a fictional take on art, happenstance and the perpetual quest for reinvention by a man and an artist.