Film Review: Kate Plays Christine

On July 15, 1974, 29 year old news anchor Christine Chubbuck went on air, calmly recited a pre-written statement, and shot herself in the head. 
Chubbuck’s suicide was an aggressively public act, a form of pre-meditated performance, taken to lethal extremes. But the footage has been kept under lock and key, she is now rarely spoken of, and the truth of her struggles with depression remains a mystery. 
It is at this intersection of the public realm and the unknown that director Robert Greene enters. Greene’s previous work in Actress and Fake It So Real has also explored the boundaries of fiction, non-fiction and performance, demonstrating that these supposedly separate genres are always overlapping. His work acts as an illustrated warning about how “truth” in film is always a construction. 
In Kate Plays Christine, his exploration becomes even more layered. Greene has little information about Chubbuck’s personal life, and of course her thought process remains unreachable to both the director and lead actress Kate Lyn Shiel. Yet they begin to film. Recording Sheil’s research and rehearsal process for a biopic that never materialises, the curtain of performance begins to fall – and eat itself. 
Sheil hates the stilted re-enactment scripts, which force unconvincing interactions, and her frustration as an actress is palpable. But Greene is deliberately creating these sites of conflict and transparency, to ensure that the audience remains aware of the process of construction. And at some point, Sheil seems to convert to Greene’s thinking, exaggerating both her limitations in playing Christine, and her reaction to those limitations. Sheil is playing Kate, and Christine, and Kate-playing-Christine – and the separation between the three becomes increasingly ambiguous. 
Kate Plays Christine is an intense, compelling and deliberately vexing viewing experience; a cinematic Mobius strip that demonstrates that manipulation and truth are not always as contradictory as we assume.