The story of Enric Marco premieres at the 81st Venice Film Festival, presenting a lighthearted account of a real-life fraud who didn’t see anything wrong with taking upon himself the task of speaking about an experience he never lived through.
There are many reasons why telling the story of the Holocaust remains of utmost importance even 80 years after the liberation of the camps. It’s not only to bear witness, as the facts have long been established, and perhaps not even as a warning, as monstrosities against human nature have not left us. Telling the story has helped some survivors cope with what they went through as a form of therapy, while also inspiring people to choose the role of the hero if such a time should present itself again.
Enric Marco was one such person. His gift of gab helped him secure plenty of listeners who hung on to every recollection of the horrors he claimed to have endured. A charming, remarkably benevolent man considering what he supposedly went through. But once a historian scratched beneath the surface, a petulant fraud reared his little head.
Enric Marco was exposed in 2005 for having pretended to be a Holocaust survivor for decades. His motivation for this never became clear, but epithets such as self-importance, fame, and illusions of grandeur all come to mind. How else do you explain a person caught in this deplorable lie who refuses to confess? The Nazi regime attacked human dignity and corporeality. Marco’s crime was against human nobility.
The film, Marco, debuting in the Orizzonti competition of the 81st Venice Film Festival, starts off as a reconstruction documentary. The images are sharp, with a field reportage type of quality. It takes a while to understand that we are watching a fictional film. This is, however, no fault of the lead, Eduard Fernández, who imbues Enric Marco with a spring in his step and a magnetic playfulness that often threatens to make too light of the subject. The only voice of mortification comes from an actual survivor who finds it impossible to put into words how violated he feels by Marco’s deception.
The movie refuses to end on a depressing note, offering Marco up as a delusional buffoon who refused to give up his fabrication until his death. You could argue that this is the entire point – to put the viewer in Marco’s shoes, who sees it as a white lie. But I felt cheated by the movie’s conclusion, as it gave an unrepentant fraud even more attention.
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