A Letter to True

Another of Bruce Weber’s stream-of-consciousness cine-scrapbooks and it’s still hard to tell if this is pompous self-indulgence or the profound outpourings of a visual beat poet. There’s undeniable beauty to it, as you’d expect from such an influential fashion photographer. And the decision to frame a meditation on post-9/11 angst in letters home to a beloved pet dog works far better than it should. Yet Weber’s mythologising of American loss of innocence (what, again?) and his homilies on world peace play on tired liberal totems like Martin Luther King and John Lennon and sit uncomfortably with an over-arching sense of sentimental nationalism. A bit of mutt.