Another

 The Other Possible. The Desire to Replace What One Cannot Recognise 

To see a face is already to hear: “Thou shalt not kill.” 

Emmanuel Lévinas 

“Perhaps another version of us exists.” It is around this possibility that Andy Chen builds Another, a film that uses the device of alternate realities to explore identity, desire and the replaceability of the other. An intriguing premise that nevertheless comes up against a confused screenplay, unable to organise its different narrative layers with sufficient clarity. The overlapping of realities, memories, presences and identities often makes it difficult to follow the thread of events. The problem is not necessarily narrative complexity itself, but a form of writing that fails to master it: even when following the story attentively, one reaches the conclusion with numerous unanswered questions and a sense of disorientation that cannot always be attributed to a deliberate directorial choice. 

The film, however, finds a recognisable thematic core in the relationship between Joey and Ben. She writes fantasy novels; he belongs to the world of scientific research. Two professions, but above all two different ways of relating to reality, which become the ground for a rather explicit cultural hierarchy. In Ben's world, fantasy seems to serve a fundamentally escapist function: a way of avoiding reality rather than confronting it. Literature is thus relegated to an inferior position in relation to scientific knowledge, as though imagining were an intellectually less significant activity than explaining. 

Joey refuses to accept this hierarchy. In response to the supposed superiority of the questions formulated by scientists, she offers a simple observation: often, it is the questions themselves that are wrong. And when she speaks of fantasy, she does not understand it as an escape, but as a way of intuiting what rationality cannot necessarily grasp, including the forms human desire can take and what people are willing to do to satisfy it. 

The issue, however, does not remain confined to an intellectual confrontation. It becomes a question of recognition. Joey reproaches Ben for his absence, for never being there, for managing to leave her alone for an hour even on an occasion that matters to her. The argument in the car and the accident that follows abruptly interrupt the confrontation, but do not erase its significance. The distance between them was already there: Joey does not feel seen or recognised, either in her work or in her identity. 

It is from this fracture that the film introduces the possibility of another version of existence. Ben's return, after Joey believed him dead, opens up a dimension in which memories no longer coincide and reality seems to have shifted elsewhere. But the science-fiction device ultimately reveals something more ordinary and, precisely for that reason, more unsettling: the desire to recover the other does not necessarily coincide with the desire to recognise them. 

The theme of the appropriation of identity recalls Arthur Harari's L'Inconnue, in which the other becomes the territory of a substitution that compromises the very possibility of being oneself. While Harari examines the dispossession of identity through the body, Andy Chen shifts the problem into the realm of relationships: it is no longer merely the body that can be replaced, but the loved one, when they fail to correspond to the image we have constructed of them. 

Ben seeks a second chance, but the possibility he pursues is that of reconstructing Joey according to his own expectations. An alternative version of the woman he loves, spared from loss and, above all, from her irreducible autonomy. The other thus becomes an image to be corrected, a presence to be reshaped into the desired form. The problem is no longer finding someone to love, but finding someone who corresponds to the idea we have formed of them. 

From this perspective, the title Another acquires a dimension that goes beyond its simple reference to the multiverse. There is always another possibility: another version of ourselves, another person who might prove more suitable for a possible him or a possible her. But this possibility also contains a form of violence when the existence of the other is reduced to the availability of a more convenient, more compliant version, one that better conforms to our own desires. 

The paradox is that Ben, who belongs to a world that claims the primacy of rational knowledge, ends up using science in the service of a profoundly subjective illusion: that of being able to shield love from loss, conflict and unpredictability. And while Joey's fantasy is dismissed as an escape from reality, it is precisely Ben who constructs an artificial reality in which the other is finally expected to coincide with what he desires. 

Another therefore has an interesting insight, but fails to translate it into an equally solid narrative construction. What remains is the contradiction running through the film: seeking another version of the other in order to avoid confronting the real one. As though loving someone meant being able to rewrite them, rather than recognise them. 

A human being is never merely a means, but always also an end in themselves. 

Immanuel Kant