Storytelling

The director of Happiness has produced a characteristically scabrous dissection of the confused motives that can lie behind 'true-to-life' writing and documentary filmmaking. Solondz offers two separate stories ('Fiction' and 'Non-Fiction') that unfold amid the sadly comical terrain of college and high school. In the first, a young female student has a stranger-than-fiction sexual encounter with her creative writing tutor. In the second, a struggling documentarian sets out to faithfully record the life and thoughts of an ordinary American adolescent, but finds himself irresistibly drawn to the exploitative possibilities of the material . . .