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ROME 2013 Competition

I Am Not Him: is another life possible?

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- The new film by Turkish Tayfun Pirselimoglu, coproduced in France, Germany and Greece stars a man who takes someone else’s identity

I Am Not Him: is another life possible?

I Am Not Him [+see also:
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, by the Turkish director, painter and writer Tayfun Pirselimoglu, is one of those films, which puts spectators to the test. Few dialogues, a fixed camera, long scenes, following small, everyday rituals. It deals however with a theme that has always fascinated human beings through art, literature and film: the theme of the double. Who hasn’t ever desired to be a double? Why? And how?

The first film in competition at the eighth Rome International Film Festival (November 8-17) and coproduced with France, Germany and Greece, I Am Not Him transports the spectator to a desolate and retrograde Turkey. The story follows Nihat, played by Ercan Kesal (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
Mold), a middle-aged man of few words, who never smiles and who works in the café of a hospital. His life involves peeling potatoes, watching television and going to see prostitutes. Ayşe (the German actress originally from Iran Maryam Zaree), a young woman taken on to wash dishes, shows a strange interest for this taciturn and impenetrable individual. She invites him for dinner. A little reluctant, he ends up accepting.  

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At home with the woman, Nihat finds a photo of Ayşe next to a man who looks like him a lot: it is her husband, who has been in prison for years. Nihat understands the woman’s intentions and follows her in her perverse games. The man will slowly take on characteristics from the absent husband, starting by wearing his slippers and driving his car. He will end up taking on his physical aspect and responding to his name.

Why does he do it? Why does Nihat decide to take on the identity of a man full of problems, in prison, accepting to live with the consequences? The film does not give an answer to that question. To desire another life, in general means to want a better life. You cannot presume that he does it for love either: when Ayşe disappears after a tragic accident, Nihat decides to completely transform himself in the other. The police will mistake him for the prisoner (who has escaped). But even when he is being questioned, the man will never utter the fatal words that would save him from years of prison: I am not him.

The theme of the double after a while goes further still. Nihat looks for Ayşe in a woman he meets in the street and who looks incredibly like her. The two end up playing the roles of other people’s lives. It would have been good if Nihat, just once, had changed his profile’s expression, which in two hours of film he does not manage to do. He puts his glasses on, shaves his moustache, but his gaze is always the same, lost in the middle of nowhere. There is a suspicion that even for the main actor the film required endurance to get through. 

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(Translated from Italian)

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