It’s oddly appropriate that the title of
Kon Ichikawa’s film Brother has alternatively been rendered in English
as both Her Brother and Younger Brother, summing up the film’s
elegantly evasive nature, the difficulty of establishing the intended
perspective on what’s shown. The opening stretch suggests no such difficulty: Gen
and her younger brother Hekiro in their different ways struggle to cope with
the stepmother, a pious Christian who endlessly cites her medical ailments to justify doing almost nothing around the house; their father, a subdued writer, is silent
for so far into the film that one starts to assume he’ll never speak at all. An
early, chilling scene has Gen wrongly accused of shoplifting, shoved around and
even threatened with a whip by the store manager before being released with the
thinnest of apologies; it’s Hekiro though who actually steals, for which he’s expelled
from the Christian school (a mere prank, he says, to which the adults
overreacted). From there the film evolves into something more wayward and unpredictable, with strange characters and potential subplots (particularly
involving men with an eye on Gen) popping up and then exiting the narrative; Hekiko’s
behaviour becomes even more wild and impulsive (and the film’s depiction of these
actions correspondingly fragmented), often with financial consequences for the
family, all of which comes to a sudden fault when a persistent cough turns out
to be tuberculosis. All of this often carries the sense of a darkly velvety
mystery which can’t quite be solved, a sense which carries right to the final
shot, when the family dynamics appear to have shifted once more, in a way
beyond our capacity to analyze. Overall, the film may not showcase Ichikawa’s restless
experimental streak as consistently and strikingly as, say, An Actor’s
Revenge (or, less happily, the insipid and barely watchable Being Two Isn’t
Easy), but it lingers in one’s mind almost as effectively.
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