I Act, I Am (Miroslav Mandic, 2018): Slovenia

Reviewed by William Geare. Viewed at the 2019 Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

Miroslav Mandic’s I Act, I Am is an exploration of the idiosyncrasies of the acting world.  An anthology of three stories, each segment depicts a different actor taking the “craft” so seriously that they compromise their actual work. The first segment depicts a young girl who, in order to get into character as a thief, begins a string of robberies with escalating stakes that eventually interfere with her ability to perform the character. The second is about a man who, in a quest to perform more authentically, begins spending nights on the streets to prepare for his role as a homeless man. As a result of seeing the plight of the impoverished, he becomes disillusioned with his privilege and completely commits to a life on the streets. The third segment depicts two soap opera stars who confuse their on screen chemistry with legitimate love, causing disastrous results for the production.

Though handled with an appropriate degree of melancholic dryness, I Act, I Am often reads as a comedy. And a funny one at that. The film takes an accurate picture of the pretentious aspects of artists, and finds clever ways to exaggerate and amplify the actions and consequences. As each segment gets progressively more ridiculous, it becomes clear that the film is poking fun at its own concept. It’s an enjoyable ride with a lot to love, yet something about it feels underwhelming. There’s nothing overtly wrong about it – the actors are all serviceable, the camera work effective, and the writing sharp, but there is an ongoing sense that the filmmakers exhausted what they were trying to say in the first segment, and the second two are just different meditations on the same statement. This by no means makes the second two parts failures (quite on the contrary I felt the middle chapter was the most effective at conveying the message of the film), but rather that witnessing the three segments back to back feels tedious and repetitive. Perhaps there might be a more effective format  to tell this story than that of a feature film.