Each year there are scores of films to choose from at the MAMI Film Festival — a prospect that’s as intoxicating as it’s terrifying. How do you decide which to watch? Though I didn’t get a chance to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9 , an obvious top seed among documentaries, the two stand-out films for me from this year’s Mumbai Academy of Moving Image’s (MAMI) festival happened to be non-fiction: Three Identical Strangers and Matangi/ Maya/ M.I.A .
Twins separated at birth and reunited later in life is a familiar plot device in popular culture. Now make that triplets, with the tale straight out of real life, too, and add a smattering of sinister science. The resulting concoction is Three Identical Strangers , a documentary by Tim Wardle that mines a terrain both outlandish and outrageous.
“I wouldn’t believe this story if someone else were telling it, but it’s true, every word of it,” says a middle-aged Bobby Shafran, as the film opens.
It’s 1980, and Bobby has just rocked up at a college in New York state. His reception is bewildering — people greet him with friendliness, he gets slapped on the back and kissed on the lips, and, oddest of all, they insist on calling him Eddy.
Soon it becomes clear that he has a doppelgänger, a long-lost twin brother. Shortly after, Bobby and Eddy meet.
“There I am, his eyes are my eyes and my eyes are his eyes and it’s true,” says Bobby, of that first encounter. We discover, as they do, that they had been adopted from the same agency soon after their birth in July 1961, with the adoptive families clueless they were each getting one half of a set. If this appears crazy enough for one lifetime, there’s more to come. The story and their pictures hit the papers, and 19-year-old David Kellman has a funny feeling he’s looking at himself. We now have a third identical brother.
An exuberant first act takes us through the instantly feel-good beginnings of the reunion, the bonhomie of the threesome and the triplets revelling in a 1980s version of virality. The boys set out to discover more about their birth mother, and how they were adopted and placed with different families. That quest leads us to, as one character puts it, “some Nazi shit”.
Though some of the reconstructed segments are distractingly mounted, and one narrative thread on the nurture/nature debate feels overwrought, the strength of the tale itself is enough to buoy the film through these quibbles. Expect to be awed and slack-jawed.
From three-of-a-kind territory, we enter one-of-a-kind with Matangi/Maya/M.I.A , a documentary about the sui generis pop star that zaps across two decades of her life. Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam, or M.I.A, the Sri Lankan Tamil artist who grew up as a refugee in London before bursting onto the rap/hip-hop scene in the 2000s, has sold millions of records with her politically provocative, genre-bending style.
When she tells the camera, “You want to see my story? I’m gonna show you my f***ing story,” you know you can expect some enjoyable badassery.
Steve Loveridge’s movie fixes its gaze on the making of the musician rather than the making of the music; eschewing the creative journey in favour of weaving the supporting political context. M.I.A’s voice has never been limited to singing; she has deployed it repeatedly to speak of atrocities committed during the Sri Lankan civil war. Although the question arises whether a pop star with an insulated, glamorous existence can genuinely inhabit the role of a rebel with a cause.
Like Strangers , Matangi too powers along without an overarching third-person narrator, letting the footage speak for itself. Arulpragasam gave old friend Loveridge 700 hours of her own tapes. Much of this is candid stuff of her growing-up years, her attempts at filmmaking, her diary-style recordings on camera.
Bits and bobs of her big hits — Paper Planes , Galang and her controversial violence-filled music video for Born Free — make appearances, and the film’s energetic crackle-and-pop sets the right tone for the artist at its centre. Even so, its patchwork feel can, on occasion, be confounding for non-fans.
Arulpragasam first saw the film when it debuted at Sundance this year and was reportedly upset with her portrayal, and the missing focus on her music.
But the unfiltered portrait of a brash, ballsy artist is precisely what gives the movie its heart and smarts.
Bhavya Dore is a Mumbai-based freelance journalist