A hauntingly strange story
Twin brothers Alex and Marcus Lewis reveal the chain of events after an accident in ‘Tell Me Who I Am’
If you lost all memory of a deeply painful experience, could you say you had never experienced it? Would your ignorance in that situation count as a blessing, a curse or both?
Though I have never (I think!) been in a position to answer those questions, I am surely not alone in having turned them over in my head as part of an idle brainteasing exercise. The mind sometimes likes to play these games with itself, to question the boundaries of its own perception and retention.
But those boundaries turned out to be anything but a game for Alex and Marcus Lewis, the 54-year-old identical twins who tell their sad and hauntingly singular story in Tell Me Who I
Am, a new documentary from English director Ed Perkins. Thoughtful and resonant but also troubling in ways both expected and not, the movie elegantly distils a chain of events that the brothers recounted in their 2013 memoir of the same title.
It begins with Alex recalling a motorcycle accident he experienced in 1982 at age 18 that left him in a coma for six weeks. When he regained consciousness, he couldn’t remember his own name or recognise his own mother; he had no recollection of anyone or anything except, miraculously, Marcus.
From the outset, Perkins’ film acknowledges the preternatural connection twins often share, granting them access to the same feelings and premonitions and binding them in ways that seem to exist beyond the reach of logic. In Alex’s case, that bond, the only memory left intact after his accident, proved instrumental in his recovery.
For most of the film, the brothers speak in solo interviews that are fluidly interwoven, which creates the illusion of a seamless conversation but also emphasises their separation visually. It’s rewarding to see this story play out not just in the brothers’ words but also in their faces: Alex is cleanshaven, bespectacled and earnest, while the grizzled Marcus seems slightly wearier in spirit.
After the accident, Marcus recalls, he spent days, weeks and months immersing Alex in the stuff of everyday life, teaching him how to ride a bike again and re-familiarising him with close friends and acquaintances.
But the music and the mood begin to darken as the brothers turn to the specifics of their sheltered family life outside London, evoked in fragmentary, impressionistic visual re-creations and the recurring shot of two beds side by side. Marcus had to reintroduce Alex to their boisterous, ungainly mother and their strict, distant father and also to a life where material privilege and emotional deprivation went hand in hand.
It wasn’t until years later, after their parents’ deaths, that these questions suddenly resurfaced, as Alex stumbled on shocking revelations that Marcus had deliberately kept from him for years.
Perkins’ film is neatly structured in three acts; the first unfolds from Alex’s point of view and the second from Marcus’, while the third brings them together for a long-overdue moment of reckoning.
It’s at this point that
Tell Me Who I Am becomes not just a record of a story but also an active, therapeutic part of it. The movie attempts to engineer a moment of catharsis between two brothers who have always been inseparably close but who have never brought themselves to have a face-toface conversation about their deepest wound.