This is a Festival review of As if I am not There (2010)
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7 October
This is a Festival review of As if I am not There (2010)
* Contains spoilers *
One usually gets so much of the feel of what a foreign-language film will be from the title that it has been given, and that can be misleading (or just a bad choice), so it is good to know that this one was intended. Obviously, such things should not carry too much weight, but there is the feeling in these words ‘How can this be happening to me? How can something so outside my experience be taking place?’
And this film shows a response to that horrible feeling of unreality. Any suggestion, as in another review that I have read, that it was just made to have some sort of gruesome residue of appeal that it does not really deserve is just so bizarre as not to merit any real further comment. Things on which this film relies happened (maybe to different people and at different times), and I really struggle to believe that anyone would think the film made just to exploit those people’s suffering.
It does not rejoice in that suffering, but shows how the small group of women with whom we end up managed – or chose to manage – in humiliating conditions after their menfolk had just been executed for no crime other than being men, and being from the wrong racial group.
No one depicts rape for its own sake, and here, in the case of Samira (Nastasa Petrovic), it is a vehicle for us to witness her seeking to absent herself from the brutal and disgusting way in which she is being handled – ‘treated’ is too genteel a word for it. And, of course, there are worse atrocities that could have been committed (and which are visited upon a young girl in a cruel parody of the Christian cross and what it is meant to symbolize), but, for Samira, recently travelled from home and family to a new place where she expects to teach and care for children, this must be unimaginable, unbearable.
When she expects to be raped again, but the soldier shown into her prefers to fall asleep next to her, there is a short moment of respite from the cruelty and dehumanisation, even though, as one of the women selected to satisfy the soldiers, she and they probably have better conditions than the others, with whom we lose contact until much later. For Samira, and for her increasing bravery, the decision comes to be that of staying a woman, of putting on lipstick, and not remaining the unwilling recipient of sex, but asserting her right to be a person, to reject the men’s belief in their right to strike and abuse her.
In what I read as a by-product of that assertion, she attracts the attention of the soldiers’ Captain (Miraj Grbic), and swaps civilized – but still meaningless – love-making, rather than enforced copulation at the hands of insensitive and brutish men who do not even view her as human. Within the constraints of that role (and in a fine performance), he shows Samira such kindness as he can, but it is all too undeniable – and, at several points, cannot be denied – that they both know that he has every power over her, and that he just chooses to give her some respect, the respect denied to so many of the others from her adoptive village.
The Captain seems partly drawn to her because she is educated, from Sarajevo, and believes in herself – in the ordinary course of the events that Samira could have had no knowledge of being about to unfold she would not have been there. When the painful physical and mental things that, for me, Nastasa Petrovic’s acting render totally compelling, with her face seeming like a window through which her disbelief and sense of degradation seem transparent, are over, she cannot even go back to her home city or her family, because it is all gone.
As if I am not There is a story that needs to be told, but it in no way has that sense of a worthy subject that has been attributed to it – to see where Samira, the woman at the beginning, has come from, to see what has shocked her, traumatized her, and the legacy with which she is left in another country, and with which she seems to take steps to come to terms, is such a powerful piece of individual heroism that it truly offers hope where it feels least likely.
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