Soap operas are the most prominent form of dramatic narrative in which actors age in real time. François Truffaut’s sequence of films starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as the filmmaker’s alter ego, Antoine Doinel; Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014); and Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides (2024) are films in which actors age onscreen in the same role, shot over a couple of decades. In the field of documentary filmmaking, nothing has topped Michael Apted’s Up series, which follows a group of people from childhood to adulthood, revisiting them every seven years. Caroline Strubbe’s trilogy joins these illustrious and patiently constructed projects to present a vision of modern life as a quandary of willful misunderstanding and emotional solipsism.
“Trying to Forget to Remember” is the Belgian filmmaker’s label for her trilogy of films about two characters, as played by the same actors over the course of several years: Lost Persons Area (2009), I’m the Same, I’m an Other (2013), and The Silent Treatment (2025). The trilogy can be enjoyed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art from 7 to 14 May 2026.
The Elliptical Lost Persons Area
Lost Persons Area takes place in an existential setting: a flat, no-man’s-land populated by towering electric pylons and the trailer-dwelling workers who serve them. Most of those workers are Hungarian. The most promising among the shaggy scruffsters is Szabolcs, played by Zoltán Miklós Hajdu, also known as Uldi Hajdu, a former Cirque du Soleil member. He looks like he stepped out of a 1970s Wim Wenders film, and that’s no coincidence.
Even shaggier, because he’s the boss, is Marcus (Sam Louwyck). He lives with Bettina (Lisbeth Gruwez), who feeds the workers. We might assume Marcus is married to Bettina, especially since they have a young daughter, but this turns out to be one of the least important false assumptions viewers are likely to make.
The child is Tessa (Kimke Desart), who functions as the strangest and edgiest presence on the scene and whose existence offers implicit commentary on the rough adult world around her. She’s supposed to be in elementary school in the nearby town, although she spends most of her time playing hooky to wander in the desert and collect random totems, like stones and bird skulls. She fashions works of art with these things, either by laying them in lines along some pattern of power perceived only by herself or with more artful constructions, such as a lovely little house made of matchboxes.
When Tessa finds a dead rabbit in the road, looking more like it’s napping than run over, she gives it a ceremonial laying out. This casually noted detail creates at least two effects in the viewer’s mind. First, it can be seen as a dark nod to Alice in Wonderland, for Tessa lives very much in her own head, to the point that we may wonder whether she has an undiagnosed condition. Second, a viewer’s instinctive desire to find foreshadowing and recurring motifs may cause us to recall and misunderstand the bunny business when a shocking discovery occurs at the film’s end.
Tessa clearly loves her parents and vice versa. The relations between Marcus and Bettina are more mercurial, if fundamentally loving. The two major strains on Marcus are when he must share his business with Szabolcs or risk losing his license, and when he’s seriously injured in an accident, as conveyed in an elliptical manner through the bus windows.
“Elliptical” is a key adjective for Lost Persons Area and its sequels. They tell straightforward stories in offhand ways, allowing us to piece together what’s happening from shiny fragments, like bits of a mosaic Tessa has constructed. This film uses the handheld technique, sometimes called “shaky-cam”, as it jitters all over in the manner associated with cinéma vérité documentaries.
The style itself has become a deceptive conventional signifier for “reality”. Because this association exists in most viewers’ heads, the utterly mystifying ending, which is all the more disturbing for withholding just enough information to maximize our discomfort, borrows this notion of “realism” and “documentary” to convey what’s really left-field melodrama.
The Quietly Thoughtful I’m the Same, I’m an Other
I’m the Same, I’m an Other appears to follow directly from Lost Persons Area. It was shot a few years later, so that the child is older is one of those magical details we must overlook or treat symbolically.
The story takes place over the course of a week or so. Although the handheld camera is present, many shots are balanced and serene for a widescreen approach. A car drives down the highway. A cargo boat floats in the fog under a bridge. An English seaside village perches in its tatty low-rent splendor. This is the most enigmatic, dialogue-free film of the trilogy, composed almost entirely of hushed scenes that observe the behavior of Tessa or Szabolcs, or their guarded, often tense interactions.
The viewer’s sense of confusion and suspense, especially for those who haven’t seen the previous installment, derives from shots of a newspaper story indicating that this mysterious silent little girl, who looks starved and ragged and at one point travels in the car’s trunk, has been reported missing from what the authorities found at her home. She and the sketchy man have little to say to each other, but they sleep separately, and the man worries about being discovered.
After a period of settling, their relationship moves into moments of grace and privilege, shot beautifully. Tessa becomes the leader at times, exploring the world in her packrat way, both insular and curious, discovering the tactile and visual qualities of natural objects and human detritus. This is the idyllic side of her semi-autistic creativity and totemism.
Her darker, obsessive-compulsive nature is expressed with distorted close-ups. David Williamson’s photography and an expressionist score by Albert Markos are especially important to these effects, as are David Verdurme’s editing and Senjan Jansen’s sound.
Several references to jazz artist Chet Baker make him a sort of patron saint or spirit animal looking over the timeless space of the present moment in which Tessa and Szabolcs dwell. They receive transmissions over the television: old cartoons, Sir Richard Attenborough talking about birds (making us more aware of the birds we see in I’m the Same, I’m an Other, more spirit animals), even a documentary about Baker that brings Szabolcs up short, either because of the poetry or because he’s reminded that Bettina said Baker looks like him. More patron saints are seen in photos of Queen Elizabeth (law and order) and Prince Charles and Princess Diana (love).
In one sequence, Szabolcs wakes to find Tessa has slid into bed beside him. He resists freaking out as he understands that she’s seeking security, as when she climbed into her parents’ bed. Things remind you of other things and have many meanings, both in themselves and as echoes.
For those who saw Lost Persons Area before I’m the Same, I’m an Other, one scene echoes the prior film’s dead rabbit. The quietness and lack of hurry allow such thoughts to process in the heads of Szabolcs and the viewer. We needn’t have instant reactions; we may have delayed or layered reactions.
One of the man’s realizations is that this relationship is untenable. These thoughts are never articulated. They articulate themselves. It’s partly projection, partly telepathy. We infer his thoughts when he proves them by going out and finding a woman to sleep with; she is similar-looking to Tessa but, of course, older. The woman says she had a beautiful dream in which Bambi licked her. Her dream signals that I’m the Same, I’m an Other is populated with animals, birds, and insects.
Film buffs love to cross-reference films. It makes us feel better. This film’s placing of characters in desolately lovely industrial landscapes will remind viewers of Michelangelo Antonioni because, well, we can’t help it. Edward Hopper‘s paintings are another reference. The concern with interior architectures is a mark of Joseph Losey. The film that I’m the Same, I’m an Other brings to my mind is The Silence (Tystnaden, 1963), Ingmar Bergman’s puzzling spellbinder, although I’m not trying to get you too excited.
In That Space Around The Silent Treatment
The Silent Treatment is, unsurprisingly, the most stylistically and thematically mature film in this trilogy. It seamlessly blends the handheld style with scenes of classical balance, offering numerous meticulously geometric perspectives in its Budapest tale.
Our initial POV character is Andrea (Diána Magdolna Kiss), a physical therapist living in Szabolcs’ flat while he works with his brother in another town. Andrea is mystified by letters and phone messages from this mysterious Tessa, who announces that she’s 18 and out of the institution. You can imagine, and so does Andrea.
We may conclude that Tessa’s institution has given Tessa no information over the years, or that she ignores what is provided to her in favor of her preferred wishful narrative, which doesn’t sound like a clean bill of health. Maybe she just needs to hear her diagnosis from Szabolcs before she believes it, but first she must track him down while he runs in the opposite direction, perhaps due to court orders.
Everyone gives everyone the silent treatment, and they all pay for it, as does the viewer. This is one of those narratives that wouldn’t exist if everyone either behaved rationally or at least spoke clearly to each other.
One of Caroline Strubbe’s themes is that people may jump to obvious, wrong conclusions, and she structures her narrative to ensure they do. She seems to determine all her characters’ behavior by asking, “What’s the exact opposite of what this person should do in this moment?” She’s not interested in a credible story, and really not interested in a story at all. She’s interested in creating an enigmatic space in the viewer’s head, or in the space midway between our heads and the spaces on screen.
This enigmatic space exists within each film and also between them. Without giving away spoilers, I’ve tried to describe what one gathers from watching these films in order, and The Silent Treatment finally makes everything as clear as it’s going to be regarding questions like “What the hell were you thinking?” However, Strubbe has made each film stand on its own, if suffused in mystery, so that watching them in a different order can increase your opportunities to second-guess yourself. Accordingly, the MoMA screenings will take place in reverse order, with the last film shown first.
Viewers who judge films by credible stories and behaviors will have a problem, because Strubbe’s trilogy is as unreal a melodrama as anything by Douglas Sirk. The Silent Treatment is contrived and manipulative, and I don’t use those as dirty words. All fictions are contrived, and audiences pay good money to be manipulated. Only critics have been conditioned to perceive far-fetched melodramas as a bad thing.
It’s no great stretch to suggest that Caroline Strubbe has absorbed the legacy of New German Cinema and applied it to her own purposes. Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog reinvented the conventions of melodrama, while Wim Wenders used his characters’ wanderlust and dislocations to look for emotional gold at the heart of modern ennui and isolation.
Wenders finds that gold in the beautiful humanism of his drama, Perfect Days (2023), which is about Zen and the art of cleaning toilets, but his older films are Strubbe’s tuning forks. Alice in the Cities (1974) follows a child from place to place, while Paris, Texas (1984) climaxes in a lengthy heart-to-heart where people explain themselves.
I’m the Same, I’m an Other is perhaps most similar to Wenders’ The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972), in which somebody has done something bad and now wanders around. Perhaps that makes Strubbe’s version sound darker than it is, though it’s still dark. Part of its darkness is what the viewer projects, especially without the context of the other two films in Caroline Straubbe’s trilogy, “Trying to Forget to Remember”.