A Triple Whammy: "Three Identical Strangers" asks troubling questions – US News

NEW YORK – The documentary film "Three Identical Strangers" begins with Robert (Bobby) Shafran, 56, who looks at the camera, telling the following incredible story: In the fall of 1980, when he is When they arrived in a small New York community, the students kept coming back and asking him how he had spent his summer. The excitement of the 19 year old child quickly became confusing. Why would so many perfect strangers be happy to pat his back and share gossip with him? Why did not the women that he did not know stopped to kiss him affectionately on his first day on campus?

The riddle was solved when one of the other students called it "Eddy". When he seemed perplexed, the student insisted that Shafran looked exactly like a young man who had attended college the previous year. The guy asked Bobby if by chance he was born on July 12, 1961 and had been adopted. The answer to both questions was yes.

Shortly after, Bobby finally phoned Eddy's home in Long Island and found that he was his twin brother, who had been adopted for adoption in another family a few months after they were born.

The reunion between Bobby Shafran and Eddy Galland quickly became a media sensation. The twins were photographed for several local newspapers, including The New York Post. If it was the end of the story told by "Three Identical Strangers", which was premiered at the last Sundance Festival, the film would have been just one of a long list of "The Three Strangers", stories of separated siblings at birth.

But this was only the first rebound in the plot. It was not long before Shafran and Galland were part of a set of triplets: the third brother, David Kellman, joined the festivities shortly after the publication of the article in the Post.

"Three Identially Strangers", released at theaters in America last week (and bought to be screened in Israel by Yes Docu), has had remarkable success, already raising more than a million dollars. The film also includes new revelations about a controversial psychological study by the late Peter Neubauer, a prominent Freudian psychologist of Austrian origin who worked with Anna Freud and emigrated to the United States after World War II. It's a troubling and tragic story about the jewish Jewish scientists who did not hesitate – less than two decades after the Holocaust – to use human beings as laboratory rats: A study that fundamentally changed the lives of the three protagonists of the documentary, and more than 60 sets of twins were supposed to provide an answer to the clbadic question of human development: the nature or the acquired – which plays a bigger role in the development of a person, his genes or his environment?

"Three Identical Strangers", directed by Tim Wardle, is one of those often low-budget documentaries that focuses on unforgettable characters, reveals new information on shady dealings and has twists that would not be shameful "Game of Thrones." Still, this film differs from the others in the genre because of the gradual and intelligent way Wardle unveils the story. In a sense, the relatively slow pace of the film allows viewers to experience an emotional process – albeit relatively fast (the film lasts 1:30) – which is parallel to what the three young men have experienced. The euphoria that accompanies the initial discovery is soon replaced by an emotional complexity that in turn leads to a tragic end and difficult questions about the latitude that Neubauer and his team look at with regard to babies and children. parents who adopt them.

The first optimistic part of the film focuses on the joy of discovery and the meeting of the three brothers. Although they grew up in different parts of the state of New York in families of different socio-economic clbades, the three seem to be clones of each other. In the early 1980s, during talk show interviews, all three happily told excited hosts that they only smoked Marlboros, that they preferred older women, that They were trying to make a career in wrestling and that they shared the same body language. Since the three loved to wear identical clothes and boasted of black and broad shoulders, it is easy to understand why the media fell in love with them.

For a moment it seems that the joyful discovery of the other was the best thing that could have happened to the trio. This feeling is amplified when Shafran recounts how he and his two brothers were the favorites of the Club 54 and the New York night scene in general, and shared a single apartment in the 1980s. In one of the moments the The movie's more amusing, Shafran remembers how the three were arrested on a Manhattan street and were spontaneously invited to participate in a scene in "Desperately Seeking Susan", the 1985 film that made Madonna a movie star.

In another scene, Galland says that the trio took advantage of the surprising similarity between them to use the brothers' health insurance to fund an appendectomy for another brother. In 1988, the three took advantage of the media coverage to launch a restaurant called Triplets Roumanian Steakhouse in SoHo, and the euphoria continued unabated ("In the first year we won 1 million" says Shafran proudly in the movie).

But financial success and family utopia were short-lived. A few years later, it became apparent that despite their similarities, there were disagreements between the three regarding management style and work ethic. By the time of the closure of their restaurant in 2000, the excitement after the discovery had been replaced by questions that refused to give them, as well as to their three adoptive parents, the slightest respite: Why was it? did the adoption agency not inform the parents that their child had siblings? ? Why have not they ever asked if they would agree to adopt them as well? How did this policy affect the lives of other twins or triplets born in the 1950s or 1960s and adopted, who have not yet discovered their brothers and sisters?

The six adoptive parents held a meeting in the late 1980s with representatives of the Jewish adoption agency Louise Wise Services, now gone, and received laconic responses. Shafran's father told the camera that he and his wife were informed that the boys had been separated because the agency feared that no family would agree to adopt three children.

It was the day the families received the first warning – but not the last one – that something more sinister had happened. Elder Shafran had forgotten his umbrella in the conference room where the fateful meeting had taken place. "He returned to get it," says his wife, in the movie, "And he walked into the room to see them open a bottle of champagne and warm each other up, as if they were had dodged a bullet. " suspicious and angry.

The champagne that was opened in the first act becomes a hair-raising story in the final act of the film. "Three Identical Strangers" raises difficult questions about how Neubauer managed to recruit an adoption agency to conduct a social experiment for two decades, many of whose details and results remain unclear even today. . Neubauer himself died in 2008, but on the basis of interviews with research badistants who participated in the study, one of his objectives was to gather empirical data on the impact of styles. parenting (authoritative versus permissive) on children.

"Three Identical Strangers" is a moving and wise testimony of a family that broke out and managed to come together against all odds. This film is not only remarkable for the warmth, charisma and personal charm of its heroes, but also for the way it confronts the audience with the problems of free will. Although the controversial psychological study of Neubauer has been exposed in the past (for example, in "Identical Strangers", the biography of twins Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein of 2007, also separated at birth as part of the same experience), the first documentary on the history of triplets. The surprising success of the box office film can be attributed to the trend of the "real crime" series and the thirst for factual stories at a time when the border between truth and fiction is becoming more and more blurred.

"Three Identical Strangers" is thus a faithful representation of the spirit of the times. It is about how the authorities and those in power – led by a charismatic and respected psychologist – abuse their powers in the name of science. The study in question and the film itself fail to provide an unequivocal answer to the question of nature versus the acquired, but its decisive results prove that a favorable environment can save a lot of people from personal tragedies that are not their own. . In this sense, "Three Identical Aliens" deals with parenting as much as genetics.

Above the film is the ghost of the biological mother of the triplets, which is only briefly mentioned and whose name is not revealed. Bobby and David dryly note that they managed to locate her and met her in her late twenties. It turns out that the mother was a young woman who got pregnant the night of her late – night prom. Shafran says that she probably had serious emotional problems, but did not reveal whether he or her brothers stayed in touch with her.

While the film provides a complex and evocative picture of the triplets and their adoptive parents, the woman who gave birth to them remains out of the box. Nobody asked if she wanted to participate in a scientific experiment whose results would remain secret for decades. This story has many victims, but the biological mother is the only one that Wardle and her interviewees were apparently reluctant to interest.