from blood to the heart
by
Douglas Messerli
Martin
Escoffier and Victor Habchy (witers and directors) Un frère (A
Brother) / 2018
One
you get over the fact that French directors Victor Habchy and Martin Escoffier suggest
that an older brother, age 17, is the best one to teach his younger sibling of
15 the joys of sex—including male-to-male masturbation, oral sex, and all-out
buggering, along with old-fashioned canoodling, tickling, and erotic messaging,
some of these acts performed in the same room with a young sister—A Brother is
one of the most charming and seemingly innocent of celebrations of gay love
since Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name of
a year earlier, several of whose tropes this film incorporates.
I’ll grant you that Tom (Simon Royer) and Félix (Marin Lafitte) are not really brothers, but Tom
has long dreamed of having a slightly older sibling, and like the rest of his
family, who have all just retreated to their summer rental house, is distressed
to hear that a family friend announced she has just had a stillborn baby boy
who might have been a brother to his older sibling.
Sleeping in bunk beds with his overly
curious and intelligent sister Bertille (the memorable child actor Oriane
Barbaza), Tom suddenly awakens to find a strange boy asleep on a nearby
palette. “Who is he?” asks Bertille. “I
don’t know,” answers her far more timid elder brother. One can almost imagine
the comical late-night interchange between Tom and his parents: “Mom, Dad,
there’s a boy beside my bed!” And in this sense, the sudden appearance of the
intruder is a bit like a supernatural miracle, a slightly symbolic appearance
of a liberating force not so very different from the visiting angel in Pasolini’s
Teorema.
Félix, we soon
discover, is the son of his mother’s friend Iris, who for slightly mysterious
reasons (her husband evidently is in London to where she and Félix soon intend to travel) have been invited by Tom’s
parents to stay with them until they depart.
If at first the new boy seems a bit
distant and even surly, particularly when he comes to his relationships with
adults, Félix soon proves himself a wonderful older brother-figure to Bertille and
quickly gains the trust of Tom, who has just a few days earlier found a cache
of 60 euros (discovered in Bertille’s bag after a run-in with an older boy who
has probably stolen her toy bus), and now determines to share the money not
only with his sister but with his new found “brother”—over the protests of his
sister, I might add.
Before we know it, the boys are showering
together with Félix languorously messaging shampoo into Tom’s hair and
demanding Tom do the same for him. Before we can even wink, the two have
extended their pulsating hands to run them over each other’s chest and,
finally, their penises. It is, quite evidently, sex at first sight.
The only problem—at least for Tom—is that
his new “brother” is a heterosexual exploring not only sex, but liquor, drugs,
and all things that might be forbidden.
His mother is obviously far more
open-minded about his liquor consumption than are Tom’s parents. But then all
three are what might be described as somewhat absentee parents who party each
night quite late at a nearby wine-tasting bar, leaving Bertille in Tom’s
trusting hands.
For his part, Tom, who at 15 is still a virgin
who has never even imagined having a girlfriend, shies away from the new
activities in which Félix attempts to involve him, including hanging out with
two friendly local girls at the neighborhood lake. In some senses, Tom is a bit
like all younger brothers who slightly hold back the foolhardy impulses of the
elder.
Yet Félix does manage to inebriate Tom
with a half bottle of wine stolen from the family’s basement, and later, to get
the 15-year old peaceably stoned in the nearby tree-house. Félix insists that his new younger “brother” join him
at a party to which he is invited by a girl to whom the elder is attracted, and
even manages to extend the curfew time until midnight.
Seeing Tom’s total discomfort as he sits
alone, almost mopeing while the elder dances with the host, Félix invites his
little brother to dance, teaching him a basic hopping step which suddenly
lights up Tom’s face as if he and the elder boy suddenly were the loving couple
he secretly hopes they might become.
Yet,
when Félix returns to his girlfriend, the younger boy is even more chagrined,
and, since their curfew is fast approaching determines, despite his brother’s
pleas, to leave the party early. We later discover that soon after Tom has
left, the police arrived and closed down the party for loud noise, drugs, and
sexual acts. It is a foretelling, of sorts, of a later event, when the brothers
need to heed each other’s warnings.
On a bicycle outing a few days later, Félix
encourages Tom to stop in a field along the way where, pulling down the
15-year-old’s pants, he begins to suck him off until the owner of the grove scares
them off.
We might still describe this act as
another attempt by Félix to “teach” his new-found sibling, but when the two
later take to the shower again, this time ending with the elder enjoyably
fucking the younger, we know that, no matter where the rest of the narrative
goes, that these two boys and the directors’ movie has moved on into a place that
can no longer accept their brotherhood to be something related to blood except
as it pulses through the heart.
In
a few days Félix and his mother will leave the boys’ new-found paradise, and in
the meantime the two can hardly keep their hands off each another. At one point when Tom joins the
elder boy in bed, running his fingers down Félix’s back while whispering into
his ear, Bertille, quite awake, queries them with a quite calm voice, “Are you
two kissing?”
Even while they work to put a nearly
impossible picture puzzle together, the camera scans their fingers as if they were
aching to touch something other than the “puzzle” that may be said to signify
their own lives. That puzzle represents the famous Hokusai’s The Great Wave,
a foreboding image that will soon play a role in their lives.
To celebrate Félix’s last night at the
resort, he and Tom attend a beachside party with others their age, including
the boy who, in the first scene, had stolen Bertille’s toy. He now apologizes
to Tom for his behavior, but Tom’s attention is far more concentrated on his
friend’s attempt to sneak away with his girlfriend.
Tom soon discovers them, apart from the
others, in deep embracement as they kiss. His jealousy is obvious, even in the
darkened landscape in which the directors have shadowed their acts. When the
other party-goers, in search of more beer and snacks, suddenly determine to
swim across the lake in order to reach the store instead of driving there, Tom,
atypical of his cautiousness cries out that he will join them.
He has hardly jumped into the lake,
however, before the abashed Félix appears on the pier to ask Tom to return. At
first his friend ignores his pleas, but when he begs Tom not to join the
others, the would-be swimmer almost joyfully gives up his intentions.
At the train station the next morning Tom
attempts to stolidly accept his lover’s departure very much in the same way
that Timothée Chalamet sees off Armie Hammer in Guadagnino’s film. But suddenly
overhearing his mother’s comment, upon reading the local news, that 3 youths
were drowned the night before in the nearby lake, Tom—as in so many
dozens of romantic films—runs after the train as it leaves the station.
In the day of totally electronically
controlled doors and windows, however, there is utterly no possibility that Tom
might, like Audrey Hepburn in Love in the Afternoon be pulled into the
car by his Gary Cooper. Tom’s desperate cry of his lover’s name
declares his recognition that he has suddenly lost an important part of his
life. His innocence has been transformed that very moment from a simple loss of love into a new identity that will completely alter the rest of his life. The love
that could have no name now surely has one.
Los
Angeles, August 11, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (August 2020).
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