Reality's baby

By Steven Zeitchik

Is there a place where fantasy can become reality, and reality turned into fantasy? Apart from Hillary Clinton's campaign headquarters, that is. Two praised filmmakers who will come out of 2008 with a lot more media than they started it with may have their own answers to the question.

On the fantasy-into-reality side, consider Atom Egoyan, whose "Adoration," was one of the better offerings on the Croisette. The structure-inverting Canadian helmer has made a habit of parlaying dreamlike abstractions into emotional truths.

Egoyan's new movie depicts a fantasy invented by a teenage protagonist -- a terrorist act the boy says was committed by his late father but which never happened -- and turns it into not just a metaphor but a psychological fig leaf for the real act of violence in his family. The use of fantasy and deliberately withheld information "is not just an intellectual exercise," Egoyan said in an interview with Risky Biz. "It's rooted in the emotional truth of the characters."

Egoyan also is taking on the theme in his next pic, a film titled "Seven Wonders," which he explained concerns two women who meet online and who may or may not be having a series of adventures at the seven wonders of the world but whose feelings those adventures illuminate -- in other words, their fantasy shows (and becomes) reality.

On the other end of the spectrum is Maria Zenovich, the media-darling of a documentarian who meticulously explored the statuatory-rape trial of Roman Polanski in her eponymous Sundance/Cannes movie. Slate, though, tweaks her as someone who may have let a small fantasy enter her version of events.

Kim Masters' well-timed report ahead of the movie's HBO premiere Monday night explained that the last scene of the film, in which judge Larry Fidler supposedly made a demand in 1998 that Polanski could return to the U.S. only if he appeared at a televised court appearance, isn't true. The judge imposed no such condition. That's not just a small factual oversight -- it undercuts the movie's basic premise that Polanski was the victim of media whoredom. Oops. HBO suggested it was revising the final scene before the airing.

Forgetting what that means for the earlier buzz on the Sundance pic (no word, by the way, how ThinkFilm will handle when it opens the movie theatrically) -- what does it mean for documentaries, a platform that, Discovery Channel programs aside, still claim to be about truth? Hey, maybe the best way to get some reality is to have Egoyan direct a documentary .