My first response to this movie was, like the vast majority of responses here, Wow! And I was genuinely moved. But then things started niggling at me, little, well, niggling questions. In the first place, of course, the whole set-up is highly artificial: the re-enacted 'showdown', the withheld information, the pretense that Alex doesn't know what Marcus is going to tell him (via video!). Okay, fair enough, nobody said this was happening in real time; but it does make one wonder what exactly a documentary is, if it doesn't contain any (or much) actual documentary footage. This is, in short, a re-enactment passing as a documentary. Fair enough. But there were still others, and, reading the review headed "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?', I found myself, yes, thinking. The reviewer objects to the notion that a mother could shop out her own sons; now, that, I must confess, I don't find implausible: the newspapers offer plenty of evidence that, alas, there's nothing that some parents won't do to their children. So I didn't have a problem with that. And I took on trust the notion of extremely selective amnesia, unusual as that seemed. But then: we are told that the father didn't know that his wife was on a regular basis carting off one of their sons to spend the night in an unnamed location with an unknown person, leaving the other son behind to say ..what? to this father. Really? And given that the two boys were forced to have sex with each other and with their mother in each other's company -- would they not have discussed this with each other? Like WTF's with Mom? But there's no mention of that, central as it surely would have been to the relationship of two pubescent boys under such circumstances. And all the unopened Xmas and birthday gifts: why? And which family and friends did they have on a gift-giving basis who didn't suspect something was wrong? Like, I wonder why Marcus and Alex never thank us for the presents? And why are the boys made to sleep in the barn? Wouldn't Mom have wanted her sex objects nearer at hand? And why decapitate a naked picture of the two boys? And hide the picture in a locked secret compartment, the key to which is, miraculously, found in a house that makes a haystack look tidy? And and and ... once you start asking questions it all seems, not just implausible but impossible. Alex can't remember his former girlfriend, but, we gather, has sex with her again without her noticing that he doesn't know who the hell she is. And Marcus escapes from his mother's artist-rapist friend, travelling on the Tube without a ticket 'as one could do in those days' -- well, no, one couldn't. He'd have had to jump a turnstile. But that's a minor detail. It's just that there are so many implausible details that you have to wonder, and once you start wondering. ... It all reminded me of *Patrick Melville*, which, ironically, is presented as fiction whereas it's apparently largely autobiographical. And I must confess that I found myself, yes, wondering whether the brothers hadn't also read Edmund St Aubyn ... an unworthy thought, no doubt, but an irresistible one. Ultimately, it seems wiser just to take this as a well-made mockumentary-cum-fictional-dysfunctional- family saga. As that, it works well. The central performances are excellent.
Review of Tell Me Who I Am
