question:  What is the author's strongest critique of Barker's directorial style?
context: Can a documentary use scripted scenes and yet remain ontologically authentic? Unmade Beds , Nicholas Barker's " 'real life' feature film," has proudly worn its mongrel status as a "directed" documentary of single life in the big city, employing, in the face of criticism, what amounts to a cackling-punk defiance. The movie tracks four aging New Yorkers--two men, two women--through their lonely dating rituals, in the process depicting a universe of lusty, coupled-up haves and downcast, excluded have-nots, all viewed Rear Window -style through rectangular openings in the massive apartment houses in which they reside. The director selected his four subjects from many hundreds of potential candidates, followed them around for months, and then scripted their monologues and dialogues to reflect what he says he saw. Calling his own film "an exercise in mendacity," Barker goes on, "I'm quite happy to tell lies about my characters and even collude with their self-delusions if it enables me to communicate larger dramatic truths." It's always nice to see distributors proved wrong about the merits of "difficult" films, but in this case I think they did the decent thing. The outrage it has prompted isn't the Puritan kind; it's more like legitimate revulsion at watching a blowhard pervert people's lives in the name of "larger dramatic truths." The larger dramatic truth is that Michael has lots of trouble getting dates and is very bitter about it. Just in case you feel too sorry for him, however, Barker is careful to include a homophobic monologue in which Michael complains about young women who waste their lives hanging out with effeminate males. Michael turns out to be the film's most sympathetic subject--by a wide margin. At least he's not Mikey, a paunchy 54-year-old who writes but can't sell screenplays and who always flees blind dates, because the women he gets fixed up with are "mutts."
output:  The drafted nature of Barker's characters' speech is inconsistent with his claims of the film being categorized as a documentary
options:  The drafted nature of Barker's characters' speech is inconsistent with his claims of the film being categorized as a documentary  The film does not include enough monologues from each of the four characters to be considered a documentary, and instead relies predominantly on voice-over narration  Barker attempts to capitalize on western society's simultaneous intrigue and revulsion with vile characters who live at the margins  Barker's juxtaposition of the sympathetic with the distasteful does not match up with the actual lived realities of the four main characters featured in the film