Were they always the same two?

Rating: Null/10 (2 February 2014)

It is a year of American excess in film: Spring Breakers, Wolf of Wall Street, The Canyons, Bling Ring, this.
The shape this excess takes here is con-men creating stories of entrapment, fictions, but finding themselves intimately vulnerable in them. Both as we watch, and even more powerfully in retrospect of the whole thing, we are able to see that for example when the girl exposes her real identity to the FBI guy, it may be a con as well as a genuine opening up. It can be both at the same time and there's no way to know, so we find our own selves caught in that ambiguous simultaneity.
It's always an illuminating opportunity to observe truth in the middle of illusion. Illuminating because nearly every aspect of life is propped in this way, we always take the first leap into a role (be it a job or an affair), creating or entering a commitment that will allow us to invoke a self worthy of it. I may doubt myself, for example that I can make a good lover, but even that must be built on having decided to find out. We build the ladder that will get us up there means we have already made the decision to get there.
I leave out the irony of the main story, where the FBI agent is the ambitious shark and the politicians being bribed are essentially trying to speed up what's good and needs done, creating jobs. That's fine, an extra tension here, goodness as a matter of how far you follow up a story.
The main thing here for me is that slippery edge of personal truth. Is Bale's character 100% faking his jealousy over the kiss?
Yet look what happens. The elaborate con, the fact so much time is given to it and we go through so many situations, cons us the fragile tension of simultaneous truth only to substitute it with a logical one in the story: people being conned (politicians and mob).
When he pulls the rug from under our feet in the end, as con films usually do, we stick to the construction of a retrospective simple truth of them having been in control the whole time. I miss the question, how much of their love was tangled up in the mess they leave behind? Are they same two?