Son Frere

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Film Description

Intimate human drama concerning two brothers attempts to reconcile after one is diagnosed with a potentially fatal illness. Intricately made, this is absorbing, grown-up entertainment.

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Review by Mike McCahill on 22nd July 2004

February: Thomas (Bruno Todeschini), a businessman in Paris, is admitted to hospital, complaining of sweating and coughing fits to go alongside his habitual fatigue. By July, Thomas is holed up with brother Luc (Eric Caravaca) in a rocky holiday resort, waiting to die.

Director Patrice Chereau here follows up his groundbreaking work on the mechanics of the human body in Intimacy with something a little more fleshed out and emotional: a serious and sobering study of what happens when that body goes wrong. So many (mostly American) films offer up the spectacle of impenetrable bodies, illustrious corpses, but Chereau’s leads are nothing but vulnerable; both Todeschini and Caravaca submit themselves to the camera in ways unusual for male-directed actors.

Chereau appears to have been taking notes from two of his female colleagues. The film could be seen as a fraternal rebuke to Catherine Breillat’s A Ma Soeur!, its technique of shooting male flesh perhaps drawn
from Claire Denis’ Beau Travail. Chereau also makes the most of a seemingly unpromising hospital location, with its random encounters between the sick and the dying, its open doors allowing Luc to peer into other wards and witness for himself what we all have to expect or fear.

Absolutely part of the post-Irreversible “cinema de l’escargot” decried by Cahiers du Cinema, in that it very much boils down to a reconciliatory dialogue between two men in a room, but it’s a film both warm and painful, with the ability to cut to the bone and provoke real tears: a lesson in the fragility of the snail shell or, indeed, of the form of any living creature.

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This film is part of the following Film Collections

The Best of Gay and Lesbian Cinema

Including: 100 Days Before The Command, 15, All About My Mother, All Over Me, Another Way, Bad Education, Beau Travail, Beautiful Thing, Blue Gate Crossing, Boyfriends.

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