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Cold Copy
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Some power-driven women are sisters under the lipstick … and also, as we see in Cold Copy, under the de-stressing sauna sweat. First, why the lipstick? Because, as the film informs us in voice-over from the outset, modern TV journalism is all about projecting a persona (which is more than just a public image) … and not really, anymore, about truth? Ah yes, we are in the Death of Truth groove that mainstream movies have been lolling in from Broadcast News (1987) to Civil War (2024). It’s the weirdest form of remediation, basically: films calling out other media like TV or photojournalism for doctoring, spinning, re-editing those precious bits of tape or footage in the name of a sensational angle, a story (a word hammered in every second scene of Cold Copy) – as if cinema is, was and always will be somehow removed from the taint of such processes. A strange and deluded form of a medium’s self-glorification. With another wrinkle worked in, this time around: when rookie journalist Mia (Bel Powley, also among the producers here) sees her (already massively slanted) portrait of sullen teen Igor (Jacob Tremblay) not re-cut in the slightest but entirely re-voiced by her ballsy mentor, Diane (Tracee Ellis Ross), she cries theft and inauthenticity! A little like Winona Ryder seeing what her MTV-career-track boyfriend Ben Stiller did to her precious piece of video verité in Reality Bites (1994). It’s hard (to say the least) to make this sort of conceit dramatically convincing. So, what does Mia do then, in retaliation? She re-edits some audio of Diane speaking and releases it to the exposé-hungry media … audio stolen (here it comes) in the sauna, post-sweat-session: that very private, intimate experience which Teacher recommended to Student. It’s an odd, compelling spectacle: intercut pores in extreme close-up, excreting all the shame, bile and alienation of those enslaved to the media treadmill! A tale of power-women going at it, turning the tables, exploding in fury, lying and conniving, pulling the fast moves … Films have been there before, many times in fact, as for example in The Business of Strangers (2001). Writer-director Roxine Helberg, in her debut feature, gives it the familiar mirror-game machinations and (ahem) subtext (a word Diane actually uses in her tightly regimented journalism classes): across the generations, across the racial divide (Tracee Ellis is Diana Ross’ daughter!), across allotted social positions, these two gals will be revealed to be the same ruthless beast underneath! (“Your goal first” turns out to be the top principle of journalism as taught at whichever vague university or college is featured … that, and “story is king”). Cold Copy (not a good or memorable title) isn’t a telemovie, but it comes on like one, just slightly jazzed and glitzed up (the set of Diane’s top-rating TV show looks like an underground nightclub). Beyond the ever-rotating round of betrayals – Mia’s black flatmate Kim (Nesta Cooper) at least lands on her feet by getting her candid confession of journalistic being-backstabbed and failing into Ellipsis magazine! – there’s a fugitive thread of perversity: not only Mia and Diane sweating it out as they gaze into each other’s eyes, or teacher showing student how others would perceive the gesture of casually touching her leg … but, bumping over a little into Larry Clark or early Harmony Korine territory, the mutual-manipulative vibe playing between Mia and her young subject, the rich, flaneuring and always masochistically-beaten-up Igor. None of these intriguing side-paths, alas, go anywhere except to be funneled back into the central show of Black Widow-type, switcheroo power-plays between the central women. What does the “theatrical release poster” say? The truth is always a lie! With that advertising, you hardly need to see the film itself. © Adrian Martin 18 September 2024 |
