The actor, who also premieres in the filmmaking of the country of his childhood, believes that only "insecurity, boredom or fear" can move someone to want to be another person.

Even so, it´s useless to plan "how the holidays will be, how my working year, how this relationship will go, the birthday party I´m going to organise; how the stock market will go, the traffic..." he says in an interview today in Madrid with EFE.

His opinion is that "There are things that we more or less know how they will be, but plans never turn out as one hopes."

Mortensen shares top billing with the superb Soledad Villamil (Claudia) and Daniel Fanego (Adrián), the young Sofía Gala (Rosa) and the Spaniard Javier Godino (Rubén). " Plans," shares Mortensen, "are like conscious dreams, longings, but they never come to be, and that has to do with the film being called that, but it doesn´t mean that they´ll be realised."

In fact, the film ends badly. Or sadly, as the director explains that nonetheless she saved one of the characters. "Rosa is freed from a certain kind of suffering, although at a very high cost...But sometimes," Piterbarg reflects, " you have to go through painful situations so that something different can emerge."

The action takes place as much in the urban setting of Buenos Aires as in the claustrophobic Tigre Delta, a place, Mortensen remembers, used by Buenos Aires' upper class for taking vacations or having a second home, but that, further up the river, becomes "something else, especially in winter, that's a little scary."

Both landscapes accompany the two brothers as symbols of the contrasts that they themselves are, says Mortensen, and perhaps, Piterbarg points out, explain why envy and the details from the past arise. "The movie has something about returning to childhood. And it gets you to elaborate hypotheses about things; it invites contemplation and reflection," she adds.

Agustín, the city-dwelling doctor, married to Claudia but tremendously alone, assumes the personality of Pedro, the violent 'islander' (as the inhabitants of the Delta are called), solitary by choice, almost always outside the law and surrounded by bad companions, when he dies.

Claudia, Villamil explains to EFE, "has the eyes of the audience, because she is present at the transformation of her husband, witnesses the crime and is also the one who discovers the lie." "She distances herself from all this craziness of the substitution of identity and moves on; she transmutes all that sorrow into something else," affirms the actress, for whom a mere glance onscreen suffices to make everything understood.

In spite of the technical complexity of playing both roles at the same time, Mortensen, who has been in more than fifty roles in as many movies, a Russian hit man, a Spanish swordsman, an Amish farmer, Sigmund Freud and Aragorn himself in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, points out that "it hasn't been that different."

"As an actor, I'm always being someone else, lying as well as possible, putting on another person's clothes, voice, a different accent, and always a point of view that's different from my own." It's the good thing about being a polyglot, although in this case, the New York son of a Danish father has had an Argentinean accent and soul since childhood.

"It's been special filming in Argentina, because I grew up there and because I admire the training of actors and the tradition of Argentinian cinema; there are always interesting things coming out of that country."

Piterbarg, successful television director, won the prestigious Julio Alejandro prize with this work, which has taken years to be released, among other things, she says, because "a first movie was a very great challenge for me, but it was good, because it matured with time."

And the director not only got a great cast, but also the producers of the Oscar winner El secreto de sus ojos. Piterbarg "is going to have a great future," predicts Mortensen, who, besides being an editor, poet, photographer, musician and painter, now takes up an activity again that he knows from his young years to become a farmer, this time in Segovia and not Denmark: "I like goats with little spots; they give better milk," he says.