Grade: A-
Bottom Line: The film is quirky, strange and mysterious — but wholly enjoyable.
Banksy is iconic. Banksy is everywhere. He’s been compared to Picasso, Warhol and Michelangelo. He’s been compared to a petty vandalist. And nobody knows who Bansky is.
Exit Through the Gift Shop is marketed as “a Banksy film,” a documentary chronicling the career of the anonymous British street artist and his partners in crime. Which explains my surprise when the film focused on eccentric French-American videographer-turned-artist Thierry Guetta.
The documentary begins with Guetta, a French immigrant to Los Angeles, as he films his obsessive hunt for the elusive Banksy — a hunt that takes Guetta through the world’s street art scene and ultimately to the man himself.
The documentary is charming. Guetta’s antics (along with his broken English) are adorable and entertaining, and the artists themselves shed much light on an inherently underground art form. Banksy (always filmed from behind and with a digitally masked voice) guides the audience (via Guetta) through his world of renegade art. As the novelty of this documentary begins to peter off, however, the film undergoes a radical shift and an entirely new documentary begins.
The second part of Exit Through the Gift Shop chronicles Guetta’s abandonment of his documentary and his subsequent rise to notoriety in the art world. Guetta, who adopts the moniker Mr. Brainwash, becomes among the highest-grossing and most controversial pop artists on the planet — all while Banksy wrestles with Guetta’s footage to create the film we see today.
Exit Through the Gift Shop is the epitome of the postmodern documentary. It is a documentary about a documentary. But it’s also about art, what art is and if the documentary itself is art. It’s all very meta.
Adding to the confusion are the rumors that Thierry Guetta is himself the faceless Banksy affecting a ridiculous accent. Since nobody knows what Banksy looks like, many in the community speculate that Guetta (along with his alter-ego Mr. Brainwash) is Banksy’s joke on the art world — Banksy’s bona fide proof that any material, given sufficient hype, is art.
As a documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop is certainly unique. It’s wholly unlike any documentary I’ve ever seen. And I mean that in a good way — the world of underground art provides a provocative setting for Guetta’s endearing insanity. The film successfully pulls off its function as a case study of street art and as a character study of Banksy, Mr. Brainwash and the artists who surround them.
Exit Through the Gift Shop starts April 30 at the Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema.