Jacques Audiard's The Sisters Brothers (2018)

Unless you don't know beforehand, The Sisters Brothers seems a grammatical error, a film in need of an apostrophe, until you realise that 'Sisters' is in fact the unlikely surname of the brothers. It's also a little unusual that male and female should stand side by side in this Franco-American film by Jacques Audiard, who is noted for his testosterone-strewn films such as Le Prophète and in my view the very disappointing Deephan. His latest, Les Olympiades, apparently marks a change, but we shall see.

The DVD cover doesn't look like my kind of film at all, but then I really have to decide on my opinion of Audiard, so I have to give this movie a go. This is 1851 and the Sisters brothers (and here the capitalisation makes sense) are the hired killers Eli (John C. Reilly) and Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix), employed to discover the formula permitting gold to be detected from the chemist Herman Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), and by any means possible, which of course includes torture.* Journeying on horseback (of course) from Oregon to California, the detective John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal) is also not only on the trace of Warm but meets him, gets him to join him on the trek, and soon he is following Warm's cause rather than the killers': the creation of a philanstery or socialist community in Dallas, Texas.

When Eli and Charlie eventually find the men they go along with the prospecting, although the formula is so noxious that it kills Warm and Morris, and Eli has to have Charlie's arm amputated. But no longer in danger of repercussions from their boss the brothers go back to their mother in Oregon where they are welcomed and almost appear as long-lost pets. An odd and very unexpected ending.

*It needs noting that the brothers are very different from each other, and in spite of his violence, in a number of ways Eli comes over as somewhat effeminate.

Jacques Audiard's Dheepan (2015)

 

Dheepan (Antonythasan Jesuthasan) is a Tamil Tiger forced to flee Sri Lanka. With two strangers, Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and the nine-year-old Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby), they pose as a family in order to escape to France, to end up in a grim HLM where the fake husband and wife become caretakers in their block. Much of the dialogue is in Tamil and the film charts the 'family's' progress in their new language.

Not only does their knowledge of the French language develop, but slowly a real family will immerge based on love and loyalty. The problem is that the gang rivalry, based around drugs, will become increasingly violent and this cité in Paris, full of ex-convicts, drug addicts, etc, and will turn into a war zone which resembles the country they've left, and Yalini yearns to leave for London, where she has a relative.

Dheepan will have to use his fighterly skills to quell the escalating violence, and this is where a story of learning to live in a completely different society and adapting to its standards swings very quickly into a blood-soaked thriller. To top it off, presumably the concluding scene of Dheepan, Yalini, Illayaal and the couple's young child living in a kind of utopia in England is just another of Dheepan's dreams?

Coming after the developments in Europe over the past five years that the film was made, it comes across as a very poor joke today. And this is such a pity, because what up to its mid-point seemed to be an extremely promising movie – especially with Antonythasan Jesuthasan's superlative acting – just disintegrated into nothingness. Palme d'Or 2015? Was there really nothing better to choose from?

Jacque Audiard's De rouille et d'os | Rust and Bone (2012)

Jacques Audiard's film is an adaptation of a collection of the Canadian writer Carig Davison's short stories entitled Rust and Bone. It stars the penniless Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) who takes his young son Sam from Belgium to the south of France to his sister Anna (Corinne Masiero), who puts him up and Ali finds a job as a bouncer in a night club. It's there that Ali interrupts an altercation between Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard) and a man, drives her home in her car as she's in no state to drive, and just leaves his phone number just in case.

Months later he's surprised that she contacts him, and in fact it's a matter of some desperation: she was a killer whale tamer but has had an accident in which she's left in a wheelchair with stumps for legs and is suicidal. Ali gives her hope, takes her to the sea where she develops a new enthusiasm for life. Ali becomes a security officer, begins a casual sexual relationship with Stéphanie while he makes money on the side by illegal boxing, which worries Stéphanie as she's developing a serious interest in him.

The crunch comes in a night club in which Ali disappears with a girl for a one-night stand, leaving Stéphanie to go through the motions of being chatted up by an oafish guy who obviously (unllike Ali) doesn't accept her handicap, doesn't accept her as a sexual being.

In the end Ali and Stéphanie both make it as a couple, although both have saved each other: Ali has turned her back into a woman, and Stéphanie has saved a man in danger of drowning (as Sam nearly did physically) in his own existential nothingness. (The OP? (opé?) messages greatly humanise the story, showing (as if it were needed) the potential modern importance of the mobile phone to cinema, which has in some ways destroyed the old-fashioned plots.)