Somewhere between realist family drama, coming of age and judo-themed sports film, Brother by the Polish Maciej Sobieszczański questions himself on the father figure and his absence, on the toxic dynamics of control, threat and fear, on the inheritance of the germ of crime and on the possible forms of feelings of guilt. A small and powerful film that works in subtraction without ever moving away from its protagonists, very human and modest both in tragedy and in hope, strong in the almost absolute realism of interpretations that leave their mark. In competition at the 37th Trieste Film Festival.
Waza-ari-awasete-ippon
Fourteen-year-old Dawid takes care of his younger brother Mihał and tries to live up to the expectations of his mother, Agnieszka, a woman whose husband is in prison and who wants to leave her toxic past behind and start over. Although Dawid has talent and strength, it is increasingly difficult for him to maintain control over his daily life, divided between school, home, the street and the gym. Everything becomes even more complicated when Konrad, a judo coach and the only adult Dawid truly trusts, enters their lives. It will be only the first in a series of turbulent events that risk destroying the family. But perhaps there is still a possibility of salvation. [sinossi]
Turgid family drama, (multiple) Bildungsroman, sporting parable not without adrenaline. Nevertheless Brotherin its way, is perhaps first and foremost a ghost film. A film about the suffocating weight of an absence that in reality is like a constant presence, a looming threat, a poison in the well that doesn’t stop poisoning one’s family even in prison. A figure of a father and a robber husband who still, through his words and his thugs, commands and threatens his two little children and his wife who knew nothing of his criminal activities; like a shadow from afar that controls them, maneuvers them, conditions their lives and choices. This is why the Polish director Maciej Sobieszczański, even before staging the brotherhood suggested by the title of his third feature film and the daily struggle of a mother who is a nurse (and of a talented adolescent judoka forced to grow up and take responsibility, and of a child who still needs to be protected, and perhaps of a possible alternative father figure…) against fear and against social stigma, chooses to open the film precisely on the off-screen scene of the great absentee, on the specter, about the puppeteer, about the bogeyman. About that faceless voice beyond the bars with which his fourteen-year-old son Dawid, shouting from a tactical position on the hill, manages to speak beyond the surrounding wall. After all, it is somehow in the relationship with that non-father – or at least in the ability to understand the need to remain as distant as possible from him, from the full awareness of the mother who would never want to see him again to the pure naïveté of little Mihał for whom stealing is not a problem because dad is always dad – that human dynamics and the growth path staged by Brotherand it is absolutely no coincidence that in the finale, Dawid’s acquired ability to physically break into that (no longer) off-screen of the dangerous parent, to look him in the eyes in the living room and say no to his face without fear anymore, will be revealed as the key to discovering himself as an adult or at least mature, finally aware of himself and his possibilities. Aware of having been shaped by trauma and moments of tragedy, aware of how close the bottom was at a certain point, but also of how his talent and commitment ended up opening new horizons of hope and potential happiness for the entire family. Perspectives perhaps only sketched, suggested, without it being possible to know what the future will decide to hold. But precisely for this reason they are all to be explored by continuing to fight on the tatami as in life, finally free and aware in the face of a new blade of light at the end of the tunnel.
On the one hand there is the absolute realism of the faces and the poignant interpretations of the boys (the very young Filip Wilkomirski in the role of Dawid and the little Tytus Szymczuk in that of Mihał, both making their debut and both memorable in their progressive live e grow in front of the camera, guided on stage by the ultra-professionalism of the Polish star Agnieszka Grochowska in the role of the eponymous mother and by Julian Swiezewski’s excellent ‘coach Konrad’), and on the other hand there are the very precise ideas of direction and gaze with which Maciej Sobieszczański, through the controlled tremors and the physical closeness of the hand-held camera of the veteran director of photography Jolanta Dylewska, frames them and constantly chases them without ever leaving them alone. A proximity that is not only visual, but in some way affective, ethical, caring, always in search of vero which, even in pure fiction, can be hidden behind a look, a gesture, a silence or perhaps in the drawing of an almost imperceptible grimace on the face, while the camera on the tatami restores the physical, sinewy and hyperkinetic physical fatigue of a ipponbut can only stop moved and ecstatic in front of the poetic explosion of a feeling. Like when Dawid defends Mihał (who doesn’t matter if he was actually wrong) from the school bullies and then from their enraged father, like when a storm breaks out and the two brothers seek shelter hugging each other under some improvised roof in the city, or like when Mihał wakes up in the night realizing that he has wet the bed. Like when the grown-up questions the little one at home, definitively replacing that father who isn’t there, or again like when he agrees to replace him in that first Confession which, aware of having sinned, at nine years old makes him so afraid of not being considered worthy of Communion. One detail, among many, with which the intelligent script of Brother (in Polish original Bratnow in the main competition of the 37th Trieste Film Festival after last year’s visits to the film festivals of Gdynia and Warsaw) somehow broadens the discussion to the entire Polish society, to the very profound cultural centrality (and perhaps also to the hypocrisy) of a religiosity which ultimately maintains its moral hold by frightening just like the almost intrinsic violence of the streets and everyday life, and then to the inevitable contrast between the tiny province in which we continue to be oppressed by father-boss and that sports scholarship which, provided they continue to deserve it, could instead lead everyone to a new life in the much larger, but above all sufficiently distant, Gdańsk.
A path – with obstacles – which is both collective, familiar, and necessarily personal, made up of the responsibilities and (in)understandings of each of the protagonists, made up of inevitable enmities and new loves to be kept secret, made up of atavistic shame and desperate cries in the night, made up of cell phones not returned and childish teasing with tragic and incalculable consequences. There is the refusal, more than understandable on the part of a child, to accept the harshness of reality, the need to move away from a harmful and dangerous father figure in his dark soul and in his presence/absence, and perhaps to overcome jealousy to accept another possible and different one. There is an older brother who feels the weight of responsibility that he shouldn’t have yet, and who rolls up his sleeves to try to help the family and learn from his mistakes. There is a mother who desperately tries to get by despite everything, to work, to raise her children honestly, keeping them away from that tree of which they must not become the fruit, to protect them from the weight of their surname. And there is also a coach who believes in the potential of a boy to the point of becoming a father figure in turn, not necessarily only metaphorical, in a crescendo of glances that will become an open secret when he is seen sleeping by the children in their mother’s bed, and then a new trigger point for further turbulence, for further and decisive traumas, for a broken glass that will prove to be a warning of a vile attack, for an electric cable that will become a cardiac massage and then a warm embrace – perhaps for the first time really vivi in the (relative) calm after the storm. Between bleeding and increasingly frayed nerves, passing through some excess of aggression as a substantial failure of reaction but also through kisses and hugs with that little girl with whom you smoke marijuana and feel grown up up to the sweetness and unforgettable impetus of every first time, Brother remains next to its young protagonist while life teaches him to trust someone, to achieve those sporting performances with which to unexpectedly rediscover hope, and when necessary to have the humility to apologize and try to make amends. Finding himself unexpectedly lucid even in the shock of a potential tragedy, in the sense of guilt that comes as a suffocating consequence of having triggered others’ feelings of guilt, in the awareness of having said the wrong sentence in the wrong way when only miracles – and the preparation of a professional, and the love of a mother – can make the darkest of catastrophes reversible, and indeed transform it into an opportunity to start again. Made more educated and stronger by life, more mature, more genuine. Free and somehow new, with no more ghosts of the past nor their emissaries, with a whole long life ahead of them to live far from there, together. Maybe it will be the culmination of a fairy tale, or maybe not. But why not try?
