Tribeca: “Re-Creation” Puts Perception & Reality on Trial
It seems like every day you can log into the streaming platform of your choice and find a new true-crime documentary to watch. It feels wrong to call this phenomenon an oversaturation of a genre, because what’s often forgotten when discussing these documentaries is that there’s a real person (or persons) who has died. True crime exists in this strange inbetween of existing as a form of entertainment and also as a means of reflecting on the life of someone who is deceased. This line has perhaps never been more blurred than in the case of Jim Sheridan & David Merriman’s Tribeca-premiering Re-Creation.
courtesy of Tribeca
In 1996, French filmmaker Sophie Toscan Du Plantier was found murdered two days before Christmas in Dreenane, Ireland. In real life, there was one main suspect, Ian Bailey. The French government tried numerous times to extradite Bailey to France for a trial, but that never happened. Sheridan and Merriman took the true facts of the case and wrote what might have happened in the jury room if Bailey had ever been tried for the murder of Sophie. Re-Creation borrows a page out of 12 Angry Men’s book and creates almost a chamber piece of the jury deliberations.
Much like 12 Angry Men, all the characters are only referred to by their juror numbers. This jury is made up of a more diverse group of people. One might say they’re twelve angry individuals rather than 12 angry men. Tensions rise when the preliminary vote shows there is one “Not Guilty” holdout. In this regard, it’s hard to shake the 12 Angry Men comparisons, as the deliberations start in almost the same way. One holdout’s doubt slowly creates a ripple of uncertainty throughout the room.
courtesy of Tribeca
Re-Creation is strongest when it leaves behind the foundation of 12 Angry Men for deeper excavations of the whole conceit of the film. Even in what’s supposed to be a place of purely fact and fiction, there’s so much doubt. How can that be? Shouldn’t we be able to know what actually happened and what didn’t? The construction of the story, both in the sense of this being a pseudo-fictitious narrative and the way lawyers present their cases, skews the way we absorb the information of the case. As much as we would all like to pretend we’re impartial, we’re not, and you can see that in Re-Creation. These jury members have come into the courtroom with their minds already made up because of the way their lived experiences influence their view of each piece of evidence. While some of the personal stories the jurors share as they debate the case come across as awkwardly shoehorned in, the sentiment is there. We’re all the sum of our parts, and that spills out when we’re presented with a situation that doesn’t have an obvious right or wrong answer.
Like the courtroom dramas before it, Re-Creation has moments of melodrama, but as someone who has never served on a jury, maybe these dramatic outbursts are par for the course. The characters in the film have to be painted with broad strokes because the audience is being asked to see things through the eyes of someone else. To essentially be retold the same story over and over again, but funneled through the various experiences of our peers. Re-Creation is not as taut as 12 Angry Men, but its strongest weapon is the doubt it casts on the things we think we know and the encouragement to listen instead of jump to a conclusion.
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