His Brother

Colour, 35 mm
France, 2003, 95 min
Section: Tribute to Patrice Chéreau

Synopsis

Thomas is dying. He has come to terms with the fact. He has decided that he will wait for death here, in the house on the beach where he spent his childhood. "I am with him. It’s still summer. I never thought that people could die in the summer. I thought death was something that always happened in winter, that it needed cold, grey skies and misery. But now I realise that it can still do its work in the sun, in broad daylight. I think that it will come to Thomas in the light of day…” In its depiction of pain and degradation, Patrice Chéreau’s laconic film goes far beyond the edge of emotions we would ordinarily recognise. It leaves behind the complex family relationships which preceded the night Thomas visited his younger brother Luc, it sets aside notions of love, sex and regret – at that point, all this became irrelevant. Thomas’s strange illness, for which the doctors seem unable to offer a cure, casts both brothers into a state of intimacy reserved only for tragic life situations, which they share and perceive as if in isolation from the rest of the world. Without any emotion whatsoever, but with tacit understanding, the director follows from close proximity the gradual deterioration of Thomas’s body and the transformation of Luc’s spirit, and their journey towards that most elemental of requirements, death and its acceptance. For his direction of this minimalist, profoundly touching film, based on the novel of the same name by Philippe Besson, Patrice Chéreau was awarded a Silver Bear at the Berlin IFF.