Why Dramatize an On-Air Suicide?

Antonio Campos’s film “Christine,” which opened last Friday at Film Forum and nationwide, is the second one this year about its title character, following Robert Greene’s documentary “Kate Plays Christine.” Campos’s film stars Rebecca Hall in a drama based on the true story of Christine Chubbuck, a news reporter for a Sarasota television station who, on July 15, 1974, while reading the news from the studio desk, committed suicide by shooting herself in the head. Campos’s film is a straightforward drama, following Christine (the character, to distinguish her from the real-life Chubbuck) through the troubled events of the last few months of her life, condensing them and organizing them so that they culminate in the one action for which Chubbuck is remembered.