Beat a path to this important documentary that looks like an attractive feature. Forbidden Lie$(2007) is simply a better (cinematic) version of Norma Khouri's book Forbidden Love, and THAT was a best-seller. An onion-peeling of literary fraud and of a pretty woman, Lie$ is the very best in editorialised reality TV.
Cleverly edited and colourful, Broinowski's storytelling is chaptered by moving silhouettes of Norma Khouri meaningfully blowing smoke. I disagree (with Variety) that it's overlong; instead my one slight problem was with the episodic nature of its key players commenting on others' just-recorded testimonials. On a single watching your sense of narrative becomes mired.....so I watched it twice.
This Oscar-worthy effort is at once genuinely funny, upsetting, and totally engrossing as it documents one lie after another. The apparent con unfolded in the Australian State of Queensland via very personal swindles of Khouri's friends and fans(!). Clearly these friends are now "turned", the funniest on-camera line belonging to Khouri's QLD neighbour Rachel Richardson who speaks her disillusionment in flat, no-nonsense colloquialisms: "I think it's a load of sh!t. Personally".
We need to learn from their experience, hence my belief in spoilers. Any perennial lie-spinner caught out in a lie will just say anything to buy time to tell another lie.
There's some breathtaking footage of Khouri cackling derisively at duping this very documentarian, who instead presses her (con)"Artist" repeatedly for corroboration.
Since being busted by Sydney Morning Herald journalists Caroline Overington and David Knox a year after publication, Khouri has been on the run, but was tempted back to the director to supposedly clear her name. She absconded supposedly because a) she's either terrified of her sly, more-Italian-sounding-than-Greek husband, or b) because she needed her passport/visas to clear her name.
Unlikely.
A more plausible reason was that the FBI regained her trail in Queensland before she again skipped overseas (one guess: No, not Jordan). According to a closing card, Khouri is "still under investigation by the FBI" in 2007.
I guessed audiences might just give Khouri the benefit of the doubt once she invoked the need for utmost secrecy and subterfuge. Instead, the audiences I sat with slowly became just as disillusioned as the duped people on the screen. Once they caught on, there was plenty counter-derision and catcalls; earlier, stressed sighs had emanated from audiencemembers who just didn't know how to take Khouri's evolving contradictions.
The filmmaker gets props for so beautifully spanning this convoluted tale from beginning to end, not leaving anything out--not even her own self-sacrifice.
Anna opens her film with a sympathetic book narration by Khouri herself. The putated reason for authoring it is retold very believably at first--key to how a lifelong liar operates: in half-truths. Khouri is nevertheless a very pretty and smart 35yr-old with rather disarming charm, and surprisingly, worked-out biceps.
Gradually we're introduced to less-and-less-adulating Aussie journos, publishers and fans who at first bought the extent of Khouri's honour-killing accusations hook, line and sinker. Later we see their more rueful reactions, quite self-controlled and matter-of-fact, if some perhaps a little bitter.
It was Jordanian (anti-)honour-killing activists who took deepest umbrage at Khouri's fallacies because its pot-stirring forced them to reduce the pace of change. Honour-killings do happen in Jordan; it's just their prevalence that's at odds with Khouri's book--plus 72 other "facts". In 2003 these activists faxed (Australian) Random House with 73 painstakingly-checked objections.
The publishing houses across 4 continents who'd jumped at the chance to publish first-time author Khouri never tried to check any facts. Leaving any corroborration to a disclaimer in their author contract, they too were fair game. So a massive hot-topic fraud was as easy to perpetrate upon the world as typing it up in Internet cafes.
Later still we're shocked to discover that the "factual errors" extend to Khouri's bio as well. For one thing, she's not only not a 35yr-old virgin (her defence is that she merely didn't disabuse people of their assumptions), but she has a slickster husband and 2 teenagers! Sometimes she's just too fast-talking in her American accent. She also seems too-comfortable with cellphone technology and Western clothes. I realise observations like these might sound prejudicial to the very Jordanian women who don't need any Western paternalism from me, but when even cultural cues don't jibe in addition to Khouri's "facts", you've got to start questioning your source.
At some point the filmmaker came to the same conclusion. She makes an admirable effort to hold Khouri to account, in person, in Jordan. The last third is consumed with a fact-finding trip back to Amman, where one "fact" after another falls. Eventually Broinowski forces her (con)"Artist" to admit the decade-discrepancy in her story, and it's after this that Khouri records her derisive secret confession into her own digital camera. Secret, because in it Khouri's "American security guard" Jeremy is heard to have an Australian accent: he's an actor! (We never find out how Anna uncovered it.)
So this becomes the filmmaker's triumph, as she never flags in her tone or commitment. Her on-camera revelations lead her audience to learn from the mistakes of others given such a litany of reasonable doubt, FBI documents--and Khouri's most shocking initial crime.
Anna Broinowski (watch-list her now) is even clever enough to use the one artistic device (key players cross-commenting on footage) to kill two birds--making her audiences want to drink from the same well again.
In fact, despite her deceptively demure approach, she made me re-confirm that Overington and Knox really DID win their 2004 Walkleys in Investigate Journalism for their "Norma Khouri Investigation".
Broinowski MADE ME LOOK.(10/10)