Review of the film “The Other Man” by Aaron Shimberg
Aaron Shimberg's A Different Man is being released, and Sebastian Stan won the Best Actor award at this year's Berlin Film Festival. According to Yulia Shagelman, The director, following his hero, was too carried away by the appearance to the detriment of the internal content.
Thanks to the vagaries of the theatrical release schedule, The Other Man is the second film in the last couple of weeks on our screens in which the main character decides to experiment in order to find a “better version of himself.” In Coralie Farge's Substance, an aging actress injects herself with a substance with unknown side effects to regain her youth. In The Other Man, Edward (Sebastian Stan), whose face is disfigured by tumors as a result of the genetic disease neurofibromatosis, does the same in order to achieve a conventionally attractive appearance. The result, as in Farge's film, is not quite what he expected.
At the beginning of the film, when Stan's handsome face is hidden under prosthetic makeup, Edward is a failed actor who only gets tiny roles in public service announcements. Some describe him as “a neurotic Woody Allen type,” and he does recall characters from his golden period, with their armpit-pulled corduroys and restless manner. The visual style of the film shot (cinematographer Wyatt Garfield) - brown tones, soft, seemingly slightly blurred image - also refers somewhere to Annie Hall (1977) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1983).
Edward lives in a cramped apartment with a leaking ceiling, from which rats sometimes fall. When meeting neighbors at the entrance, he tries not to make eye contact with them, although everyone around him (or so it seems to him) either averts their eyes from him, or, on the contrary, stares with horror and disgust. Girls don't like him, and when the lively beauty Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), who has just moved into the neighboring apartment, pays attention to him, her interest gives off a mixture of pity and idle curiosity, and she invites others to her place for the night. Of course, Edward considers his face to be the reason for all these failures and therefore agrees to become a test subject in testing a new drug.
Having literally flayed himself (in this episode, references to Allen are briefly replaced by homage to the master of body horror Cronenberg), Edward turns into Guy - a handsome realtor who lives in stylish apartments and has no shortage of female caresses. How exactly these amazing changes happen, Aaron Shimberg did not figure out, so the two parts of the film are separated simply by going dark and editing. In the end, by this point the audience had already guessed that all of this, as in “Substance,” was one big metaphor.
In his new guise, Guy meets Ingrid again, starts an affair with her and becomes the main star of the off-Broadway production of her play about a man with a deformed face, written, of course, in the wake of his acquaintance with Edward. And everything goes well until Oswald appears, a man with the same disease (played without makeup by Adam Pearson, who actually has neurofibromatosis). But this doesn’t stop him from being the life of the party, enjoying success with the ladies, dressing extravagantly, practicing yoga and jiu-jitsu, and gradually ousting Guy/Edward both from the stage and from Ingrid’s bed.
At first glance, “The Other Man” may seem like an arthouse parody of “good films” about the fact that it doesn’t matter what you look like, but it’s important to just believe in yourself. But Shimberg, as is typical for novice authors (this is his third full-length film, and in the previous one he already directed Adam Pearson), strives to speak out about everything at once. It’s as if he’s throwing ideas at the wall and waiting for some of them to stick—at most half of them stick. There is a satire on political correctness, and snippets of thoughts about society’s obsession with external manifestations of success, none of which are really formulated, and some kind of teenage cruelty towards the main character. The director, like a school bully, poisons this loser with an almost sadistic pleasure, only to eventually come to a discouraging conclusion: his problem is that he is a loser.
