Son frère (His Brother) | Review

Chéreau offers a unique view on the deep and complicated issues of family grievances.

Since the majority of the film is spent in a hospital room then it comes as no surprise that director Patrice Chéreau’s newest picture, for which he won for Best Director at the Berlin film festival, could be labeled as “depressing”. Such as in his 2001 feature Intimacy

, this film shows us the human body in more of a carnage wreck viewpoint instead of cinema’s usual visual treatment of the human form with a ballerina’s beauty. Here the human figure appears more like a carcass and under the persistently close-up camera eye it is displayed as vulnerable, weak and bare matching the notion of the bareness of one’s soul and body once exposed.

Who does Son frère appeal to? It is for anyone who has had to live through and doesn’t mind reliving the painstakingly difficult process of having to support a critically-ill family member during a long exhaustive hospital treatments and being their during a life’s final moments. What the film equally addresses on a sub-par level are the unresolved tensions and issues between siblings, where in this case, is figuratively discussed in the image and barely expressed through the dialogue. With a camera so close that the viewer hardly finds any space to breath, Chéreau goes back and forth in time from the hospital room to the minor and unimportant events leading to or after the stay. In the ill brother Thomas (Bruno Todeschini- Va Savoir) we have the sibling who never cared much about anyone but himself, who is never explored enough to understand why he might have distanced himself expect for his younger brother Luc’s (Eric Caravaca-Novo) lifestyle. While the younger must deal with a life-sentence of resentment, he must find the energy to morally support two souls and to heal them as well. Unfortunately, it is only within the film’s final moment where the weight and burden is released and where a seven-plus minute sequence of the hospital cleaning the patient procedures is drowned out of our memory.

Filmed in steady-cam glory this is perhaps not a quintessential aesthetic that is hoped for which makes it a sometimes unappealing watch and even the subject matter is perhaps depressing but it is also does nothing to resolve, add to or amplify the film’s characters. Even more useless are the supporting cast with a girlfriend with no voice, a same-sex partner without merit and a pair of badgering condescending parents with no purpose. While I love the idea of blood diseases and blood relations being used as a canvas for the film’s central themes, I think that the true core of the story gets manhandled and hemorrhages itself into sidestepping the potentially essential conflictual issues such as facing death. Son frère is a sad story, but not a particularly moving one.

Rating 2 stars