Pierre Bismuth’s confusing WHERE IS ROCKY II? isn’t about Sylverster Stallone’s boxing film but rather about a rock. It’s not really a rock since artist Ed Ruscha made the piece out of Plexiglas in 1979. Almost no one saw the piece: even friends of the artists, Ruscha experts, and known curators don’t know of its existence, but an old BBC documentary shows Rusha on a truck through the desert as he practically releases the rock. Artist, screenwriter (Academy Award for ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND), and director Pierre Bismuth wants to find this rock and has made a documentary film about it. The film often seems like a fiction film or better yet a mockumentary in which you keep asking yourself what is real and what is absolute fiction. Bismuth doesn’t just show one private detective, who is probably the real deal, but he also films screenwriters D.V. DeVincentis and Anthony Peckham (who wrote films like HIGH FIDELITY and INVICTUS) as they develop a screenplay about a detective’s search for a rock. Confused yet?
Images or the real and fake detectives are seen one after the other, a documentary and fictional version of a treasure hunt as well as old documentary footage that sometimes seems staged. A wonderful, multilayered, deliberate confusion, a blurring of layers of truth and meaning that unabashedly revolves around a piece of art that possibly doesn’t exist anymore or never has. It might exist somewhere in the desert next to real rocks and because of Ruscha’s current worth on the art market it would be an extremely expensive bit of staircase wit indeed.

Michael Meyns

Translation: Elinor Lewy