**½/****
starring Mark Clennon, Anthony Diaz, Nat Manuel, Michael Hogan
written and directed by M.H. Murray
by Bill Chambers Toronto scenester Benjamin (Mark Clennon) is a young, Black artist and musician getting his groove back after breaking up with his boyfriend and performing partner, Oscar (Kevin A. Courtney). He’s a sweetheart, the sort of guy who sends what little spending money he has back home to his mother and makes ends meet giving music lessons to kids and empty-nesters around the neighbourhood. He’s also a bit of a raw nerve: When his friend Ariel (Nat Manuel) teases him for not having slept with current beau Malcolm (Anthony Diaz) yet, she unwittingly sets off his insecurities about Malcolm’s desire to take things slow. So begins a Friday night of heavy drinking that finds Benjamin running into Oscar, who’s settled into a new relationship with ease. At first, then, it’s a cheap boost to Benjamin’s ego when a stranger (Michael Hogan) starts hitting on him on the way home, but soon the stranger’s predatory intentions come into stark relief and Benjamin, too rubbery from wine to fight him off, is raped. The next day, instead of calling the police, going to the ER, or confiding in friends, Benjamin does something that feels psychologically acute in its irrationality and starts cleaning the fridge. I Don’t Know Who You Are is at its best in these moments that defy exposition, and in fact there’s an entire other movie happening, unspoken, about what, exactly, Benjamin’s race means within his obviously inclusive but conspicuously white inner circle. One friend describes him as “our jukebox,” which maybe isn’t the compliment they think it is. (Benjamin points out that, unlike him, jukeboxes get paid.) His rapist is white, too, incidentally–and billed as “The Man.”
Benjamin needs to fill a prescription for PEP within 72 hours in case he was exposed to HIV. Feasible enough, but it costs a grand and he has no insurance, his credit card is maxed-out, and there’s a waiting period to get financial assistance. Ariel lends him $200; he casts his net for the rest, stepping up his music lessons, calling in Oscar’s debt (as literal as it is existential), and, in a particularly tense, fraught scene, paying a house call to his rich friend Agnes (Deragh Campbell), who seems to have been whisked away from the art world, not altogether happily ever after-ly, by her smarmy yuppie husband, Paul (David Draper). It’s another example of the movie’s gift for subtext as the three of them converse in passive-aggressive code, which is why it’s frustrating to watch writer-director M.H. Murray betray that, along with a Dardennesian documentary clarity, in pointless flashbacks to the rape–trust me, we know what Benjamin is thinking while he flops around in psychic pain like William Hurt at the end of Altered States without cutting away to The Man–and a fakeout I won’t dignify with a description. It’s similarly vexing that Benjamin’s self-destructive relationship with alcohol gets reduced to a deus ex machina to extend the suspense, then memory-holed for the sake of uplift.
I get it, though, the impulse to let all the air out of the trauma balloon. I thought a lot about Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, of which this film is something of a micro-budget Canadian update, and how after Cléo receives a diagnosis that’s serious but not the end of the world, a man tells her he wants to be with her, and she says he’s with her right now. I Don’t Know Who You Are is more invested in suggesting permanence with its happy ending, and while a montage-y final gathering of friends unfortunately evokes the AI bonhomie of Gigi Hadid’s Coke commercial or an ad for the latest pharmaceutical miracle, the most vulnerable people in the world right now are subject to so much abuse that the rhyme of the opening and closing images–in which one restless body becomes two sleeping in comfort–proves surprisingly cathartic. Programme: Discovery
