Mix-Up ou Meli-melo

1985 documentary

Rating: 15/20

Plot: In an English maternity ward in 1936, the Wheelers and Rylants have baby girls. They get mixed up, however, and (oh, snap!) the daughters are raised by the wrong parents for years and years.

Mix-Up resonates with me, probably because the same thing happened to me. Twice! This is a very unusual story, and the documentary style actually makes it even more unusual. There's an odd mix of playfulness and rigidity with documentarian Francoise Romand's style. About half of the shots are obviously staged. You get shots with characters standing in the foreground while other characters walk into the background, interviews with a person while a couple others watch from a window, etc. It's strange. My favorite was an interview with a brother who talked about overhearing a conversation as a boy while he was hiding underneath a table. So, of course the interview was conducted while the guy, as an adult, was underneath a table. The subjects also seem to be reading a lot of their "lines," making the subject matter seem oddly detached. There's definitely an artiness to the proceedings. You also get to see these otherwise boring people doing the most mundane things, like making tea. Peter Greenaway regular Michael Nyman (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) provides a Michael Nyman-esque soundtrack to this oddball of a documentary.