[imagesource: Showtime]

“The life of a legend is never black and white” expounds the trailer for The Real Charlie Chaplin documentary.

From what most can tell, Charlie Chaplin built a fascinating enough character that he could easily hide behind all his life, going so deep into his quirky presence that the real man ended up being completely elusive.

His story is incredible right from the beginning, going from poverty and the workhouse to becoming the “inventor of cinema, celebrity, and modernity”.

His “little tramp” character, the poverty-stricken fella with the moustache and a penchant for silent, jittery comedy, was adored across the globe – a universal, household name.

That is until he opened his mouth in the era of the “talkies”, the documentary posits.

Using new archival material of press conferences and interviews, transformed with “verbatim cinema” reconstruction techniques, filmmakers Peter Middleton and James Spinney try to retell the story of this “potent real-life legend”.

David Robinson set the gold standard for anything to do with Chaplin’s story as he was the first to tackle him in his tremendous 1985 biography.

But this new doccie goes a little deeper, notes The Guardian, which gave it four stars in the review:

…Interestingly this documentary moves away, just a little, from the unitary single-stranded heroic biography – to the multi-faceted question of Chaplin’s elusive personae, with and without voice, with and without moustache, with and without political opinions.

No matter how often I see it, Chaplin’s non-moustache face is thrillingly naked and strange: with upper lip exposed, the quirky little sketch of a face suddenly evolves into something hyper-intelligent, ambitious, sensual.

And this film is more concerned to give Chaplin’s wives more of a presence, rather than being simply walk-on players in the tabloid-gossip farce about the great genius’s weakness for sex.

Have a quick squiz at the trailer:

The film delves into Chaplin’s brave act as Hitler in the great anti-Nazi film The Great Dictator, with his famous closing speech that the film argues helped “plant the seed” of Chaplin’s downfall.

A lot of the content in the documentary seems to be stuff that Chaplin fans know about already, but the questions it asks are new, shedding just that much more light on the fabled character.

[source:guardian]