Brothers (Susanne Bier, Denmark)

by Jessica Winter

Much of the recent Danish cinema to reach international audiences has collectively resembled a post-traumatic stress centre. In Per Fly’s Inheritance (2003), suicide, money, and smothering familial obligations conspire to strip a formerly good man of his family, principles, and personality. The upscale couple of Paprika Steen’s recent directorial debut, Aftermath, shattered by the death of their 12-year-old daughter in a traffic accident, becomes dangerously estranged from their friends, professional obligations, and each other. In Susanne Bier’s previous film, the Dogme-certified Open Hearts (2002), a car mows down a young man and leaves him a quadriplegic, destroying his life and known self, and unravelling both his relationship with his fiancée and the marriage of the driver (played by Steen). Like Inheritance and Aftermath, Bier’s new film, Brothers, observes the fallout from a tribulation that utterly vanquishes its victim’s inhibitions against violence—a slippage that effortlessly carries a sharp political charge. (It’s difficult to discuss Brothers in any detail without letting drop a key plot turn, so here’s your spoiler alert.)

On first impression, it’s hard to believe that siblings Michael (Ulrich Thomsen of Inheritance and Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration [1996]) and Jannick (Nikolaj Lie Kaas, the accident victim in Open Hearts) come from the same genetic material, much less a shared family tree. Michael is a kindly family man, a top army officer about to leave Denmark to assist reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. Jannick is a surly, frequently drunk ne’er-do-well, jobless after a prison stint for a botched bank robbery. But then catastrophe intervenes to turn this paradigm of Good Brother and Bad Brother on its head: Michael’s helicopter crashes in Afghanistan and the military presumes him dead; rapidly and palpably, Jannick grows in spirit and character to fill the void his brother has left behind, much to the delight of Michael’s affable wife, Sarah (Denmark native Connie Nielsen in her first Danish role).

But Michael survived the crash: he was taken captive by Afghani rebel fighters and then rescued, and he quite literally brings the war home to Sarah and their two small daughters. Though the viewer has watched Michael’s ordeal and knows the secret rotting inside him (Sarah and Jannick share a minor guilty confidence of their own), he refuses to discuss the experience, introverting to the point of frightening implosion. He resents his daughters’ giggly silly talk, suspects his wife of philandering, and even feels affronted by the newly remodelled kitchen, a project undertaken by surrogate husband-father Jannick. Michael may have come back from the dead, but it’s Jannick who has been reborn—a happy event only made possible by his elder brother’s unspeakable torments in the battlefields.

“In our part of the world, we’re dealing with an abstract war, a war we can’t see that we’re in, which is a very strange thing,” Bier told me in an interview during the London Film Festival, not long before Bush started pulling out all the stops in Fallujah. “It’s not tangible, but it’s there, and that must be really terrifying for most people.” The typically Scandinavian cool tones and clean lines of Brothers, the muted acting, and Michael’s confusing mask of blandly handsome, white-collar presentability underscore the cognitive dissonance of enjoying serene Western comfort while nearby swaths of the globe are burning, perhaps at your government’s behest. Much as Errol Morris unleashes Philip Glass as a means of evoking “existential dread,” Bier repeatedly deploys the anxious acoustic tremblings of Gustavo Santaolalla’s “Iguazu,” already familiar from Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999) and Sally Potter’s Yes.

Brothers is a tad schematic (an Internet wag called it “the Danish Pearl Harbor,” which is partly true), but beautifully performed and bracing in its refusal to offer easy consolation. Thomsen’s performance crystallizes the abysmal loneliness—and the corrosive narcissism—of unsharable anguish: Michael is irrationally and understandably jealous of life going on without him, incensed that his season in hell hasn’t stopped the world from turning.

Jessica Winter

Brothers

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