What is real? Alex Rose seeks a kind of truth in Call It Fiction BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

There he was, Alexander Rose, in an East Side carriage house, issuing orders. Nicely, politely, but ordering people around just the same. He turned to the little boy sitting at the beatifically lit breakfast table. "OK, now David — that’s you, Sebastian — is looking at the camera, a little puzzled. You don’t look there, though, Ron — it’s David’s flashback." The grown-up actor gave a slight nod.

Disclaimer flashback of my own: It’s maybe 16 years ago. My wife and I are rapt, trying to watch a video at our friend Dan’s house, but it’s like trying to thread a needle while Fellini is filming the mise en scène around you. Dan is bickering with Debra, his girlfriend at the time. Another couple, Europeans, are coolly working on their divorce. The only person watching along with us, as fascinated as we are with Wim Wenders’s sublime Wings of Desire, is Dan’s 12-year-old son, Alex. Thinking back, I see how that transfixed little kid was taking in as much as he was blocking out.

Flash forward. Daniel Asa Rose, proud grin perched on a trim Vandyke. Dapper in plum-colored shirt, purple silk tie, topped with a white straw slouch hat, he glances toward the chair where Hollywood biggie Ron Silver had been sitting a few minutes before, playing a character based on Dan. Rose casts me an inquiring eye. "How did he look?" In my reply, I know the word "paunch" plays a prominent part. Dan grimaces slightly. "I told him to get Kevin Kline. Wouldn’t that have been perfect?"

Call It Fiction, which was filming on location in Providence in mid-May, was written and directed by Alexander Rose, who grew up in Providence and nearby Rehoboth, Massachusetts. This is his first feature film, though he has made numerous shorts, several of which have appeared on HBO and Showtime and have won eight awards. He graduated in 1998 from Hampshire College, where he studied film and creative writing. His dad Dan has gathered plenty of literary cred over the years, as a PEN Award-winning short story writer, as a novelist whose 1987 Flipping for It was found to be "astonishing and delightful" by Vincent Canby in the Times. Name a top magazine and he’s written for it.

But this isn’t about the father; it’s about the son’s movie about the father and the son, fictionally once-removed. Think alternate universe without the air-shimmering special effect.

A few weeks before shooting began, Alex was in Providence, munching a sandwich at CAV.

I think he was having a chicken thing with roasted red peppers, on a baguette. I had a sauvignon blanc. Nice and crisp. Back then he had the time to shave around his Vandyke, unlike the Arafat stubble later emerging on location.

He was describing his months-long fantasy of the year before, when he was dreaming of landing his first choice for the father character, Ron Silver, who he knew was reading his script at the time. " . . . And the next morning I got a call from Ron Silver’s agent, who said that he loved the script and wanted to talk about it. I was like, ‘Hey!’ " Alex raised his eyebrows to indicate elation.

Other familiar names also signed on. JoBeth Williams plays the mother, and Peter Boyle is his uncle and confidant. Of course, the word "his" is used loosely. The story is about a young man named David, not Alex, who comes home from college at Thanksgiving to learn that his father, a struggling writer, has finally made it big and sold his memoir to Hollywood. One result is that David’s life is about to take a careening ride over the cliff of public spectacle, as family secrets are spilled along the way. As the official plot synopsis says, he’s "forced to choose between his family and his future."

Over lunch Alex spoke about many aspects of the film coming into being. About the first-rate filmmaking program at Hampshire — who knew? About a successful LA screenwriter he interned for one summer who, by cynical, negative example, reinforced Alex’s aversion to commercial movie pap. But I was most interested in the Russian dolls aspect, the realities inside fictions inside realities.

For example: I mentioned that his dad told me that he asked him to make the father character more flawed. "Never," Alex responded, in a heartbeat. "That could not be farther from the truth.

"My dad was like, ‘Well, I don’t wanna come across as a bum, as some failure,’ " Alex said. "But dramatically, he has to be, or else there’s nothing at stake for his character.

"We’re always juggling issues, my father and I," he remarked. "They’re leftover issues from 15 years ago, 10, whatever."

Four years ago, his father published Hiding Places: A Father and His Sons Retrace Their Family’s Escape from the Holocaust. Presented as mainly a memoir, it was a much-fictionalized account structurally based on a trip to France he took with sons Alex and Marshall, 31/2 years younger, on an assignment from Esquire.

"I still haven’t forgiven him for writing Hiding Places and making my character a Republican," Alex said in annoyance, though through a wry smile. "Which he took out in the final draft, after incredible amounts of struggles. That’s not all: There’s nothing I said in that book that I actually said in real life."

But tables not bolted down can be readily turned.

"He spent his life characterizing others and putting them in his own works, but this was the first time somebody ever did it to him — so he got a taste of his own medicine," Alex said. "I love that."

None of which is to say that there is more than amiable mischief going on here. Intergenerational comeuppance, perhaps. A redress, a balance in the familial universe. What’s a little paunch between a father and a son?

No hard feelings.

"My dad has offered incredible support as an editor," Alex noted.

They typically speak several times a day on the phone. He’s also close to his mother, Laura, who got friends to put on investor parties. Financing to complete the film is still in the works, as is usual with small-budget indies. A half-dozen or so possible financing leads came up at the recent Newport International Film Festival, as people approached him after a well-received screening of some scenes he’d shot in Providence.

Call It Fiction hardly intends to grind an axe, or even have the last word about anything, or anyone, out here in the world where a tweaked nose results in a yelp — or a poke right back. Scenes show different characters’ points of view, with voice-overs establishing disagreements over what "really" occurred, the filmmaker explained.

The central question about the film, Alex said, is about the authorship of memory. Assertion implies sanctity, he declared — well, I’m paraphrasing.

"That’s sort of what his lesson is at the end, if anything," he says of the father character. "He learns that there’s no real objective reality. Any time something is subjectively experienced, it’s going to be subjectively portrayed."

Yeah. I think maybe it was chicken salad that he had, maybe that was it.

I could always ask him.

Nah.