Strictly
speaking, Christopher Kirk was not catfished or anything of the like. He knew
the woman he called V. in the flesh, but she still played him for a sap. Truth is
a slippery notion when it comes to their odd tale. One murky thing lead to
another, resulting in a Brazilian prison sentence for Kirk. It is there María Bühler
& Matias Mariani interviewed him for their documentary
investigation-meditation I Touched All
Your Stuff (trailer
here), which
screens during the Museum of the Moving Image’s 2015 First Look (this year’s
coverage is brought to you by the letter “I”).
Blame
Pablo Escobar or maybe Keith Olbermann. Even if they are not directly at fault,
they make the story even weirder. Kirk had done a number of interviews with
media types like Olbermann after a house-sitting friend wrapper everything in
his apartment with aluminum foil (leaving a note with the titular taunt). Kirk
had already grown weary of the rat race (seriously, as an IT guy in Olympia,
Washington?), so on a half-planned whim, he set off to visit a buddy in
Colombia and see Pablo Escobar’s hippos. As the last remnant of the drug lord’s
private wildlife park, the transplanted hippopotamus colony has grown and
thrived in their new Colombian climate. At least things turned out well for
them.
Kirk
lost interest in the hippos when he met V., a more demur and studious acquaintance
of his buddy’s party girl friends. Half Japanese and half Colombian, she is by
all accountants quite stunning, but viewers will not know for certain, because
every surviving picture of her is blurrier than the average Big Foot photo. Of
course, that is also part of the film’s intrigue.
For
a while Kirk and V maintained a pretty heavy long-distance relationship. Yet,
in retrospect, Kirk identifies odd little moments he should have paid more
attention to. Regardless, he could not ignore the suspicious circumstances when
he started meeting her dodgy friends. Still, she kept him on the hook, because
of obvious reasons.
Kirk
is a natural born story teller and Bühler & Mariani have a keen sense of
the film’s narrative structure, allowing the strangeness to steadily escalate. However,
viewers should be cautioned not to emotionally invest in Kirk as a tragic
protagonist. After all, he is in prison for something.
Stuff is the darnedest
doc. Bühler & Mariani do not exactly connect every dot in V and Kirk’s
mysterious lives, but the combination of what they know for sure and their
working assumptions feels like ninety percent of the truth. Of course, that confounding
ten percent is what fascinates and nags at the viewer.
