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Son frere ('His Brother') |
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Life challenges Luc to extend such a gesture to his estranged straight brother Thomas (the riveting, gorgeously emotional Bruno Todeschini), who is wasting away with an "exotic" blood disease. Through the prism of this fraternal relationship, Chereau surveys the spiritual condition of the world: Luc spies an old woman in her hospital bed, calling out for some lost lover. Every scene in Son frere (translates as "His Brother") enlivens experience: truths never before dramatized on screen, emotions never before felt at the movies. The freshness Chereau achieves is enthralling. With his latest film, Chereau - a master - answers the culture's degradation of the body by detailing the deterioration of the flesh - challenging the audience's compassion, signifying the spiritual through physical gestures. He restores the skin's signification of rejuvenation. Son frere is sublime. Chereau's oeuvre (five films released in the U.S.) constitutes a panorama of the AIDS era. L'homme blesse conflated sexual desire and death. Queen Margot juxtaposed genocidal politics with the spiritual underpinnings of culture. Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train, an ecstatic masterpiece, confronted a fractured society/family of lost souls with hard-won AIDS-era awareness - "Our lives could be more inventive." Intimacy (a title that defines Chereau's elan) traced the social tremors of (hetero)sexual infidelity with gay knowingness. Now, Son frere dives into gay people's participation in death and rebirth, mortality and immortality through an impending death in the family. (As that revelation of youth - "I am 19" - makes piquant.) The fact of AIDS is not ignored (Thomas' disease is not a displacement): Thomas confirms he is not HIV-positive, Luc's lover Vincent (the intensely sensitive Sylvain Jacques) shares his experience of a friend whose disease also eradicated his platelets - cells that promote blood clotting, like "bricks." The truth of AIDS and gayness provides the foundation. As the brothers' father rants: "It should have been Luc. He's stronger." The movie asks: "Now, what?" Son frere dramatizes a gay person's confrontation with Death - Chereau's response to Morrissey's gay declaration: "I'm the end of the family line." By queering spectators' perspective on this fundamental concern - existence itself - Chereau vivifies understanding. Cinema as an emotional illumination, the audience as a democratic illuminati: a community of the sublime.
The film's narrative structure enables the audience to feel everything. Chereau cross-cuts between the earlier stages of the illness (and the brothers' relationship) at the hospital with later scenes of the brothers at a beach house. Each time-shift is marked by a subtitle designating the month. This Cubistic perspective on physical and emotional phenomenon underscores unexpected associations, allowing them to resonate completely - an imaginative extravaganza. In this structure, the climactic holding of hands between the brothers occurs before, in narrative time, Luc's sensual massaging of Thomas' body, coiled with pain on a hospital bed. Chereau intensifies the significance of every moment, cinematically rendering the brothers' existential dilemma. Chereau conveys his characters' despair (his heroes bleed easily: the nosebleed in Those Who Love Me, sweating blood in Queen Margot, the hemorrhage during a lonely walk in Son frere). However, Chereau also revives life's potential. That defines the elation of Chereau's absolute control of the medium. With his great cinematographer Eric Gautier (who lights naked skin as though chiseling marble), Chereau's camera - whether static (as in the Persona-style two-shots) or seeking out signs of Luc's anxieties - invigorate screen space. Every movement of camera or performer thrills. At the nude beach, gawkers stare at Thomas' emaciated body. The looks externalize Luc's fears, his brother as emblem of his own Otherness. In the sea of flesh (desire and disgust), Thomas asks: "You've always preferred guys?" Luc retorts: "There's no need to care about me for me to care about you." The confessions continue, composed with Thomas in foreground close-up, Luc in middle-ground full shot. Then Thomas encapsulates the family trauma of Luc's coming out and his own disease: "Never wait for people to come back. They never do." The confrontation precedes the scene (earlier in story time, later in narrative time) of Luc's confession to Vincent: "I don't care about my brother" (as Vincent, Jacques' tenderly piercing gaze gauges just how much Luc does care). Then, Luc distances himself from Vincent, the two spooning naked in bed: "I don't feel like it." Vincent (Jacques is so good!) will define the Luc-Thomas dynamic: "You two are sharing something important." I'm sorry, but this is just awesome: gay cinema taken to a new level. In Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train and Intimacy, Chereau pitched the drama to operatic heights with daring pop selections on the soundtrack (in an interview, Chereau told me he chooses songs to which his characters would listen). With one exception, Son frere features no score, only subtly orchestrated ambient sounds (of the hospital, of the beach). When Luc enters the hospital room after Thomas' surgery, Chereau's shot - floating in awe - of Luc's countenance signals Marianne Faithfull's rendition of Angelo Badalamenti's "Sleep" on the soundtrack. This instigates a dream sequence in which Luc takes Thomas' place on the hospital bed and is abandoned by Vincent ("I can't take care of you"). The moment: Luc makes his decision to care for his brother. Faithfull (who also acted in Intimacy) intones on the soundtrack: "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust." Sitting on a bench by the beach with an old man ("Do you know him?"), Luc and Thomas take in the old man's wisdom: "That's life. Everything must end. And the sea and sand take over." Thomas reveals his wishes for burial, he wants "something to leave a trace." "You ever slept with your brother?" Thomas' girlfriend asks Luc, after his kiss blesses her decision to leave. (I won't give away the details, though Luc will tell.) He concludes: "He was the first boy I knew. That's what brothers should be for." The trace that Thomas leaves behind is "His Brother". |
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Eric Caravaca in Son Frere 
Openly-gay director Patrice
Chereau