The 20-year-old unsolved murder of a child pageant queen

A new experimental documentary at the Berlin Film Festival challenges why so many are still obsessed with the JonBenét Ramsey case, writes critic Jessica Kiang.

We live in the era of ‘truthiness, of ‘alternate facts’ and unfounded opinions presented as gospel truth. Strutting into this arena, high-kicking and making cutesy shooting gestures under a pink cowboy hat, comes Australian director Kitty Green's witty, inventive, spikily illuminating hybrid documentary, Casting JonBenét. Now, it’s not actually about JonBenét Ramsey, the six-year-old pageant queen found murdered in her Boulder, Colorado home on the afternoon of 26 December 1996. It's about the mythology of her death, about the way everyone in the community and beyond has a theory about the killing and some sort of personal connection to it, manufactured or otherwise. And most surprisingly, it is also about the gentle psychosis that is the acting process.

There is nonetheless an ethical qualm raised by Green's approach. By taking the stories, gossip and rumours surrounding JonBenét's death as her subject, Green's film operates at one further ironic remove from the visceral tragedy of that battered and strangled little body in the basement. But it's a movie that persuasively argues that the truth, as in ‘what really happened’, is unknowable anyway. Maybe now, 20 years later, the historiography of the JonBenét Ramsey murder case has more to tell us about this weird world of ours than its history. Truth might be stranger than fiction, but in its absence, fiction will have to do and when the fiction is this variegated and multifaceted, it will do just fine.

The foundational fiction of the film however, does feel a little dubious: the majority of Casting JonBenét is made up of "auditions" (shot and lit in a much more considered and less slipshod manner than standard casting tapes), for actors and non-professionals alike who are trying out for the roles of Patsy (JonBenét's mother), John (her father) and Burke (her brother) in a mooted film about the murder. The subjects were apparently aware that material from their interviews might be used, but just how much they knew about the nature of Green's intent is unclear.

This niggles gently at the conscience all the way through to the film's extraordinary, perhaps self-justifying finale. But it's especially present in moments played or edited for broad laughs of which the subjects themselves must have been unaware. The burly "sex educator" trying out for the part of the police chief is the fall guy who’s abruptly returned to after a more serious section when the other subjects have been theorising regarding the highly suspect blackmail letter – he’s still intoning his sexual preferences, including "breast torture" and "nipple play." It's a funny cut, but an unkind one.

Playing dress-up

And it's not just in making her subjects the occasional butt of the joke that Green seems to be playing it a little disingenuously. When one of the better actors to try out for John explains his reasons for participating he says that though it’s a ghoulish thing to do, it's "better than nothing", and maybe, in some obscure way "it would help." But by that he of course means "help with solving the still-open murder case" and that is not, nor ever was Green's agenda here.

It can't be said, however that ethical concerns will hamper one's enjoyment of a very enjoyable film. The actors, many of them from the Boulder, Colorado area, are a fascinating bunch to spend time with, in some cases displaying real rage, sorrow or sympathy at the memory of JonBenét's death, at others summoning crocodile tears in the hopes of better recommending themselves to the casting panel, and at still others treating the audition as a confessional, or as therapy in telling personal stories of sudden death that have become conflated in their lives with the Ramsey case, so large did it loom.

Individually, they vigorously defend their own readings of the events of that Christmas. They condemn or defend Patsy, John or Burke, or all three. They wonder why the paedophilia angle wasn't better investigated. They scorn the three-page blackmail letter, alternately point to or dismiss JonBenét's bedwetting as evidence of abuse or as the hair-trigger motivation for Patsy to commit the crime. Green interviews mall Santas (involved in one of the more outré theories), and elicits a creepily impressive version of John Mark Carr, who falsely confessed to the murder, played by an actor whose level of research is a little frightening. One of the Johns sums it up neatly by saying that there is no theory that fits all the facts that doesn't sound crazy – though that said, the lady who hints heavily at Satanic involvement due to all the sixes (JonBenét was 6, and died on 26 December 1996) is maybe a little further off-piste than most. And throughout it all, Green intersperses fragments of scripted reconstruction, starring various Patsys and Johns in various configurations.

Those scenes, in which the actors finally act, are ramping up to a final section that is essentially an art installation. On a deliberately artificial soundstage, like a set for a sitcom, several rooms of the Ramsey house are recreated, connected by a hallway that leads off backstage. In them, a multitude of Johns, Patsys and Burkes act out, in the shared spaces, the various scenarios the film has described. This stunning, life-size, overpopulated diorama is simply a brilliant conceit, intricate and fascinating in what it says about the unknowability of truth and how the practice of mythologising is basically a Hydra of endlessly multiplying theories. JonBenét herself is the least present character here, and whether that is an appropriate omission – whether it feels like a respectfully empty seat at the table or a hole where the film's painful heart should be – is debatable. Casting JonBenét is many things: funny, provocative, clever, audacious, maybe even dazzling like a Vaseline-smeared, white-toothed pageant smile. But it is not sad, and perhaps it should be, just a little.

★★★★☆ 

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