His Brother

The other like part of yourself. Shadows of past and a fragile present. Fear, emotions and long expectation. And the pain like moral mirror.

A meditation-film. Beach, sea and a hospital. Blood-sick and an ambiguous form of love. Questions, illusions, slices of hate and way of survive. A strange passing and subtle exploration of relation between brothers.

Depressing images and circles of freedom. Nooks of gestures and aspects of reality like symbols of fiction. Compasion like only instrument to define the rules of strange and cold universes. And colors of sentiments essence.

The end of film marks the last words of a subtle poem. The shadow of ataraxia after a long trip, taste of peace after a terrible fight, touch of new images and possibilities after a powerful interior tempest.

A film about death. and brotherhood. and the fight against yourself. and need of the other. and about forms of hope. all simple reflections of interior fights and profound intimacy, about fear and need to be near the other who represents, in real sense, part from yourself. a film as testimony about the genius of a great director. and about subtle, precise, touching acting. because it is one of the films with basic status as mirror for states of soul. the story as pretext for deep honesty. poetic. and cruel.

This was Chéreau's best since "L'homme blessé", an excellent little film about affection, compassion, brotherly love, death, courage. The proposed situation (an older brother dying from a blood disease seeks the support of his younger brother, somehow evoking the most critical days of the spread of AIDS) is handled with a calm tone, in a rather "Cartesian approach", not lacking bursts of emotion, but avoiding facile sentimentality. Fine script by Chéreau and Anne-Louise Trividic, from a novel by Philippe Besson, with a clever structure intersecting different planes of time, plus good performances all over, especially by Bruno Todeschini and Éric Caravaca, and firm direction by Patrice Chéreau.

When I saw this film recently on the Sundance Channel, I had no advance knowledge of it. That is how I prefer to watch any film, but publicity -- being what it is -- usually stands in the way of any such cleanly objective approach.

In this case, the story is told in segments that play around with chronological time yet achieve an overall effect of linearity. Central to the film are scenes in the hospital that capture as no other film I have seen the stark and compressed place where life and death coexist. Normally that suggests soap opera bathos, as in such TV dramas as ER or General Hospital. But here is only an overwhelming display of truly remarkable clinical minutiae, against which an inner drama between the characters is allowed to play out either in silence or in visual takes showing the characters reacting to an unfolding revelation of who they really are and how they relate to each other. The director achieves his goal through understatement, with few exceptions. Quintessentially French.

Even the love scenes, such as they are, have a clinical feel to them. If I have one negative comment, it is that the film lacks any contrasting relief from its lugubrious tone, no touch of irony or brief bit of self-effacement. Small wonder some viewers may find it flat or uninspiring.

Yet the tacit theme of finding new ways of looking at oneself through suffering and change stands out. The two brothers are seen to rekindle a relationship that had been lost or misplaced, even as death approaches inexorably. I would not mind sitting through it again to examine more closely some of its subtleties hiding behind the sledgehammer reality of hospital life.

Breaking with the visual pyrotechnics and operatic flourishes he's been associated with in the past, this devestatingly intimate drama solidifies Patrice Chereau's reputation as one of the greatest filmmakers of our time. The simple story (adapted by Chereau and Anne-Louise Trividic from Philippe Besson's novel) deals with two somewhat estranged brothers -- one gay, one straight -- who become reconciled when one of them (the straight one) contracts a rare blood disease and begins the process of dying. As the slightly smug, high-living brother brought low by death Bruno Todeschini is excellent as always. But the revelation is Eric Caravaca as the surviving brother. His fresh, unfussy performance grows in power as the situation goes from bad to worse. Catherine Ferran as the perfectly professional, but utterly unhelpful, doctor in charge is quietly frightening. Chereau regulars Sylvain Jacques and Pascale Greggory drop in for a telling turn or two, and Maurice Garrel (father of filmmaker Philippe Garrel) has a few nice scenes as an old man they meet at their beach house. But over all it's primarily a two-hander of intense intimacy. There's no music until the climax when the voice of Marianne Faithfull let's loose on the soundtrack with a song she co-wrote with Angelo Bandalamenti. And when the end credits finally roll you'll probably find yourself staggering out the door like I did. If you've ever lost someone close to you you'll feel this movie right inside your skin.