The Sisters brothers: Jacques Audiard draws (review)

The captivating western with Joaquin Phoenix, John C. Reilly and Jake Gyllenhaal returns to France 3. Jacques Audiard manages to appropriate this genre to create a very personal work.

Released in September 2018 in cinemas, The Brothers Sisters will return to television this evening. What is this film directed by Jacques Audiard worth? Here is the long review of First.

The last shot of Dheepan ended in a blinding light which flooded the new London home of the hero’s blended family – filmed like an earthly paradise as opposed to the sordid French suburbs where this Tamil had previously unwittingly ended up. The scandal, for some, was confirmed: Jacques Audiard signed a reactionary film which depicted, while disqualifying, the France of “will curdle” that it was better to let it languish. Seen like that, at face value, Dheepan appeared “ideologically questionable”, or even outright “nauseating”. Audiard could not remain indifferent to these personal attacks which pretended to ignore the fantastical nature of his film, its desire, let’s say clumsy, to depoliticize the suburbs, to think of it only as a setting for an urban western.

Could this be to correct the situation, to go against his previous film? The first plan of Brothers Sisters is completely black, brutally illuminated by the flash of a gunshot, then two, then three. It’s a long shot, from a high angle. Distant verbal exchanges resonate. From the darkness gradually emerge the two heroes, Charlie and Eli Sisters, hitmen whose competence is beyond doubt. Dheepan, a former soldier, was fleeing the violence that was within him, the Sisters brothers made it theirs.

Return to the origins of evil? Not so sure. Let us remember that Dheepan also began with a surreal nocturnal sequence, which revealed an incongruous character, cluttered with shiny and multicolored toys. The new Audiard, we will quickly see, is indeed part of the luminous continuity of its predecessor.

Did Jacques Audiard betray The Bureau of Legends?

Of Good and Evil
The Sisters brothers must uncover and kill Hermann Kermit Warm, a man who would have betrayed the mysterious Commodore, their sponsor. An evil shadow filmed from afar, the latter seems to act as a father figure (an Audiardian obsession) for our two loners who blindly obey him. Good and Evil, they don’t care about it like their first cartridge. We are in the ‘Wild Wild West’.

At first, Audiard humbly respects the conventions of the genre, with its dusty tough guys, its wide open spaces (in reality Romanian and Spanish!) filmed without bragging. As the protagonists’ speech becomes free, the ride turns into a conversation, the frame tightens, the shots “with iris”, this trademark of the director, emerges, as do dreamlike visions. The fable Dheepan becomes clearer for this admirer of Little Big Manthe great anti-establishment and pacifist western by Arthur Penn.

Guided by the utopian project of Warm (alchemist who found a chemical formula potentially ensuring his wealth intended to build a Fourierist society), the scenario of Audiard and Thomas Bidegain reveals his true intentions which consist of restoring their humanity and their dignity to characters victims of their family and social determinism.

A certain naivety is at work as in this scene where Eli Sisters discovering the virtues of toothpaste – an invention of the civilized world – begins her inner revolution. A pictorial, typically cinematic way of proclaiming the immanence of Good that the eldest brother feels confusedly and that he will try to transmit to his younger brother. The opportunity for Audiard to address for the first time the question of fraternity – its murderous biblical unconscious, its Freudian heartbreaks. He does it with incredible sincerity and tenderness that the film’s dedication to his deceased older brother reinforces.

big Bang
The success of such an enterprise is due enormously to the charisma of its performers who embody less characters than ideas: the legacy of violence for Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix, tortured like never before), the possibility of redemption for Eli (John C . Reilly, goodness and barbarity mixed), Zen prophecy for Warm (Riz Ahmed, falsely fragile angel face), opportunistic apostolate for John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal, in the most ambiguous role of a converted detective to Warm’s theses). Backwards from Dheepan this time, more silent and more graphic, Audiard chose great actors for his rather literary painting of a world ending, like a distant echo of New Hollywood and its progressive concerns tinged with melancholy.

Trailer :

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