Son Frere

Am I my brother’s keeper? -- this film asks, astringently. Two estranged brothers reconnect, when the older shows up on the doorstep of the younger, asking for help as he goes back into the hospital for tests and treatment on a mysterious blood disease. The film starts in the middle, on a seaside park bench in Brittany, with an unknown old man soliloquizing the brothers about shipwrecks, and then works its way backward and forward. This breaks up the relentless narrative drive from diagnosis to death, and allows the leisurely observation of intimate, clinical detail. Perhaps the longest and strongest scene in the film shows two night nurses shaving the torso of the one brother in prep for a splenectomy, while the other brother watches. (Was it Caravaggio who did the famous “Deposition” with the feet-first perspective?) Frankly, this is not many people’s idea of entertainment, but it is a committed application of the art of film. Patrice Chereau’s previous film, Intimacy, applied the same close-up but dispassionate attention to sex as this does to disease. I can’t think of another film as honest about the hospital approach to death, except for Wit. (If you can bear only one film of this type, watch that instead, where Mike Nichols’ impeccable direction is made transcendent by Emma Thompson’s superlative performance, in my book best of the decade by any actress.) Neither brother is what you would call likable, the younger (Eric Caravaca) insists that he is helping only because he was asked and not because of any fraternal relationship, and the older (Bruno Todeschini) is understandably querulous and complaining. Their reconciliation is more implicit than overt. This is definitely not a feel-good movie, but it will linger with you, maybe longer than you would like (as may the song that haunts the film, “Sleep” by Marianne Faithfull.) The conclusion is no “triumph of the human spirit,” but perhaps a quieter victory. (2003, dvd, n.) *7-*