Family Burdens – Weekend – Kommersant
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The new film by Arnaud Desplechin “Brother and Sister”, shown in the competition of the last Cannes and finally reaching Russian distribution, seems to complete the trilogy of “family values”, begun by the director back in 1991 with his debut film “Life of the Dead”, and then continued by the cult film in narrow cinephile circles “A Christmas Tale” (2008).
Desplechin’s universe, like 30 years ago, is based on the unity of time, place and action, and is also inhabited by the same type of sleazy, completely lost – or, conversely, locked in the above unity – bohemian characters. In the frame, Desplechin is always native to the provincial town of Roubaix, his personal Ithaca. In the center of the frame, the father’s house usually rises, where scattered by fate and their own egocentrism – in Parisian bistros, editorial offices, theaters – the orphan heroes dream of returning. At the same time, time flows, but does not change, because what is happening on the screen is exclusively the fruit of memory, sometimes, as in “Brother and Sister”, very wormy.
The theme of the family is certainly a cornerstone and meaning-forming theme for world art – from ancient Greek dramas to modern traumas, from mythology to psychopathology – there is no other such life-giving source of plots and events. Each of us is, first of all, a link in the chain of kinship – son, brother, father – from dust to dust we move along the same route. Family ties and their inevitable disintegration, which means, addressed to the rainy skies, “who is to blame?” (Freud/Marx/the society of the spectacle or the nuclear bomb) often coexists in Desplechin with another cursed question: where exactly lies the line between life and art?
In “Brother and Sister”, the director tries to give an exhaustive answer and close both of the gestalts that have long been bulging, but he drowns in a boiled mess of vulgar sentiments. At the next melodramatic leap of an overly pathetic narrative, his characters Louis (Melville Poupeau) and Alice (Marion Cotillard), a writer and actress bound by ties of blood hatred, clutch either at the heart, or at the quill pen, or at the theater curtain – in order to pour out their soul, or just blow your nose. Tears in this parable of forgiveness flow with an intensity only appropriate for Latin American television. Desplechin here clearly competes with another singer of domestic entropy Florian Zeller, but he feels the mechanisms of best-selling exploitation worse.
The reason for the many years of discord between brother and sister is hinted at. It seems that Louis, the dock of intimist prose, once made the same fatal mistake as Desplechin himself. Namely, he transferred compromising facts from Alice’s real life to the pages of his novels. It is known that after the film “Kings and the Queen” (2004), Desplechin was forced to sue his ex-wife and part-time star of his films, Marianne Denicourt, offended by the fact that the director used a personal tragedy – the death of her child’s father, her parents’ oncological diseases – in creative purposes. Desplechin won that lawsuit, although the investigation found that Denikur’s letters appeared verbatim in the script, and other “accidental coincidences” amounted to almost a full-fledged defamation case. Denicourt, by the way, took revenge on Desplechin by his own methods, in the same year releasing a book written jointly with a journalist from Liberation, in which Desplechin, renamed Duplanche, was bred as an absolutely disgusting type. “Kings and Queen” nonetheless won critical acclaim, and starring Mathieu Amalric even snatched “Cesar”.
In “Brother and Sister” Alice, without resorting to the services of lawyers – litigation for her, every night reciting from the stage of Joyce, is too petty and unworthy – achieves greater success than Denikur. She expresses her hatred in other ways – for example, refusing to sympathize with her brother, who lost his only child. Silence is worth a thousand curses, and now Louis, completely crushed, gives up a successful career, ruined and forgotten by everyone, drags out a miserable existence in the Pyrenean wilderness.
Be that as it may, Desplechin pushes the characters, caricatured in their strained hostility, at the hospital bed, on which their parents are slowly dying after a monstrous car accident (for the script, we note in brackets, completely unnecessary). Death is the first step towards oblivion, including personal disagreements. Desplechin watches the diamond of brotherly and sisterly love rising from the ashes with undisguised tenderness, at the same time inviting us to this touching performance. Well, in these times, any, even a bad peace is better than a senseless war.
In theaters from 15 September
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