***MILD SPOILERS*** Months ahead of its release in France, this screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Bruno Todeschini stars as an older brother who is dying of some strange platelets disease -- he's in danger of hemorrhaging to death at any time. His younger brother (Eric Caravaca), with whom he's never had much of a relationship, must take care of him--takes him to their childhood summer house in Brittany. This movie is unsparing. It's hard to watch an actor put himself through such grueling paces such as becoming dangerously gaunt, letting himself be treated as a hospital patient (injected, rolled over, shaved in near-real-time from his nipples to his scrotum), collapsing from a too-real-looking nosebleed. I was pretty shaken by this film. My tears were for the mystery of family love and brotherhood, what it means to think you haven't felt very much about somebody and then to realize that person's going to die, and he's your brother. Michel Ciment, guest programmer, spoke before the film and called it "uncompromising." It seems Patrice Chereau (QUEEN MARGOT) is headed in the direction of the completely stark and unsparing film. When I saw the younger brother's body entwined with his lover's, I was suddenly reminded that Chereau had made INTIMACY, the English-language film starring Kerry Fox that was so controversial because of her on-camera fellatio scene. What I liked about HIS BROTHER is its unsparingness. It doesn't try to console you for the facts of the story: that a man is probably going to die, and his estranged, resentful younger brother has to deal with it. The movie seems to be stripping everything down to the bones. The brothers do have a bond, but they can't find it until they exclude everything else from their lives, including the others that they assumed they loved more. There's a prolonged pre-surgery shaving scene that seems to be preparing us for the "cutting off" of the other relationships. Two nurses methodically prepare Thomas by putting paper under him and using an electric shaver on his armpits and chest. Then they apply a razor to get the uneven parts, all the time asking, "Are you all right?" as they work right down to his genital area. ("This will pull a little.") I guess some of the tension comes from wondering if they will nick him and cause another hemorrhage, but my main reaction was a kind of impatient boredom, wondering why Chereau was spending so much time on the shaving. That scene shows how clinical the movie was, and what a relief it finally is to be free of the hospital. The film does jump around, from "August" to "March" and back again, from Brittany to the hospital to Brittany, etc. It opens with the brothers sitting on a bench at the beach, listening to an old native talk about shipwrecks and death, stuff washing up. Not sure why Chereau cut up the time and locales the way he did, and I'm not sure it was effective. Maybe it was to give us temporary relief from the hospital scenes, to long to go to Brittany for good. There the two brothers are alone with their childhood memories, when they had a relationship. It's like their adulthood no longer matters. In one cathartic moment, when the younger brother Luc catches Thomas's girlfriend running away for good and impulsively kisses her, you find out that Thomas was "the first boy [Luc] ever had"--his brother masturbated him. The movie's not suggesting that that "made" him gay, but that the brothers had an intimacy they have since lost.
Review of His Brother
