Since the sumptuous 1994 La Reine Margot, director Patrice Chèreau seems to have been sliding towards an exhaustive realism; after the loveless sex of Intimacy, he brings us dying youth in Son FrËre. Thomas (Bruno Todeschini) discovers he has a rare blood disease that could kill him at any time. Desperate for support, he calls on his estranged brother Luc (Eric Caravaca), and the film attempts to explore the impact on both brothers of their rapprochement and looming permanent separation.
Todeschini and Caravaca are terrific, the former submitting nobly to every humiliation that illness entails; the latter staring with bruised eyes as mortality inhabits his brother's familiar shape. What lets the film down is Chèreau's avidity and meanness: by wanting to expose everything as brutally as possible, he ends up showing us very little. Thomas isn't even granted a real narrative: we never find out why the brothers were on bad terms, we don't see him discover his illness or decide how to deal with it. Chèreau is interested not in emotions but in physical details - injections, scars, shaving and bruising - and Thomas's resulting dehumanisation is reinforced by the choppy chronology: the brothers don't even get to live their tragedy straight through from desperate beginning to resigned but pitiable end.
Son Frere
Cert: cert15
