According to the advance information, Could this be you? questions like: What drives a person to extremism? Where does the wrath come from? And where is the dividing line between activism and extremism?
The film opens with a Director's statement on the theme that in these polarized times we have to dare to ask the hard questions, even those who do not have easy answers.
Then a quote from Oscar Wilde: The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
PARDON? A lecture going on?
Well, rather a kind of psychological experiment in a closed environment. An attempt to profile personality extremists. Two psychiatrists are given the task of attempting to create, through in-depth interviews, a mental profile of two robber hoods introduced by the unknown men, Alan and Bob.
In other words, the premise is hyperactive, peculiar and refreshingly odd. But then it is also the Swedish Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Lukasiak who holds the levers, she likes to tell outside the box, and seems to thrive in the border country where documents and fiction meet, or perhaps rather go into each other.
The long-film debut came in 2005 with Bortglömda, a pathos-driven arranged documentary where facts and poems go in clinch, and five years later we saw her suggestive feature film about refugeehood, Between two fires, which lay poem in reality. The mix of reality and fiction gives her specific stories greater scope, making them more universal, important.
The idea is the same here, yes, more than that. The foundation bolt itself, you could say. The title question wants to engage us, get the idea sprouting, that anyone can become a terrorist. Or at least realize that one extremist is not the other equal. Which seems perfectly reasonable.
It is difficult to put an epithet on this unholy mix of Freudian analysis of childhood, gestalt therapy and theater sports - which could in turn be something positive (labels do better on jam cans than on art), but here it becomes the most symptoms that the filmmaker has not quite reached where she wants. Or at least fail to convey any points to this critic.
Much to Filmfilm it is not, photography is just snap more artistic than that from a mobile camera, but it is okay, it is not uncommon in the documentary genre, but when even the mindset has no further sharpness, I begin to flick my eyes to find it where the circumstance overturns the thought. That makes the film grow. But not.
Well, okay, there are some psychologically exciting moments where the interview subjects get to direct actors who act out scenes from the past, the trauma that Bob and Alan carried with them all their lives. Like the scene where Bob is wedged into a corner in the 1950s scenography and relives an incident from childhood where the mother and father roar over his head - it gives a tickling bizarre Smultron place-in-robber hat-feeling.
But otherwise, it is just too vague to get involved. Psychiatrists seem to get a good look at these two tricky individuals, find in them a leader and a follower, but such a sketch of the psychological development of two people says nothing about anyone but them. And hardly that. You can safely say that the research base is in the thinnest.
The initial questions get no answer, except possibly that we are all different, but we already knew that.