Capturing the clown

David Friedman is the " number- one kids' birthday clown in New York". He is a sallow-skinned, balding, slightly doughy man, whose schtick forms around hoop-waisted, heliotrope-striped trousers and gargantuan, pink spectacle frames.

Seeing Friedman pushing his wheeled case of jollification through the lobby of a Manhattan apartment house, it is difficult to imagine him as the life and soul of a party, but then that is because this multi-award-winning documentary by Andrew Jarecki takes us into the sad and warped psyche of the clown without us ever getting to see his act.

In truth, the idea that kids' entertainers are almost certainly perverse, and quite possibly potential or even actual paedophiles, is well embedded in the collective parental psyche. I have lost count of the number of middle-class children's parties where I have stood in a parental colloquy, picking at Lilliputian sausages and making snide cracks about this balloon manipulator or that animal handler.

Ever since that point - somewhere in the mid-1980s - when child abuse reached the top of the hit parade of horrors haunting Western society, we have all become experts on the monstrous methods of these misfits. We know full well that working with children, whether as teachers, youth leaders, or entertainers, is as attractive to the child abuser as cleaning out the changing room at Raymond's Revue Bar would be to the confirmed satyriasis sufferer.

But the most peculiar thing about Capturing the Friedmans - which is an exceedingly peculiar film - is that David Friedman's chosen profession is never subjected to direct scrutiny. Instead, he is both metaphorically and literally the lens through which we get to examine the tortuous implosion of the rest of his family.

David is the eldest of three sons (the other two are Seth and Jesse), brought up by Arnold and Elaine Friedman in the Long Island suburb of Great Neck. For the English reader to grasp the particular social cachet of Great Neck, try to imagine Stanmore crossed with Hampstead.

Arnold Friedman was a respected high-school teacher, a former professional musician who also conducted private piano and computer lessons in his home.

In 1988, the US Mail intercepted a packet of child pornography destined for Arnold, and, following a successful sting operation, found a large cache of the stuff in his house. The Nassau County police then initiated an exhaustive series of interviews with Arnold's home pupils, in the course of which they apparently discovered that he, together with Jesse, his youngest son, had been systematically raping and sexually abusing a large number of local boys.

While Arnold Friedman couldn't - and didn't - deny that he was a paedophile, he could - and did - deny that anything at all untoward had happened during the computerclasses. The evidence was all in the form of testaments from the boys after the fact. Far from any of them complaining or showing distress before the police interviews, they had consistently re-enrolled in the classes, and there was no forensic evidence of the alleged hundreds of sodomitical rapes. The alleged involvement of Jesse - in his late teens at the time - was even more bizarre.

The Friedmans' story is built up by Jarecki out of a palimpsest of recorded evidence. There are interviews with the boys who alleged the abuse, and those who denied it had taken place; there are direct encounters with the police, the lawyers and the Friedmans themselves. But, more chillingly, there are videotape and cine-film clips, as well as sound recordings and still photographs provided by the family.