Brother for brother: masterpiece or turkey?

Belgian first-time director Micha Wald says he wanted to say something about brothers. World War II was his first choice but people told him production costs would be too high and that stuff's been done to death anyway. So Wald switched to an almost abstract world of wild boys and macho men, wooded groves and lakes, open shirts, sabers, fur caps, horses, to the region Wald's forebears come from and the time of the Cossacks.

This film set "somewhere in the East" in 1857 can't be taken realistically on any level and isn't meant to be. How else would a bunch of Slavs all speak perfect French? It's hard to know how to take it, and for this reason responses have hit opposite extremes. Some French reviewers were enthusiastic, others dismissive. Within what everybod[/i]acknowledges was a very limited budget, Voleurs de chevaux[ has daring and sweep. Wald pursues his story with the same intensity as his characters pursue their fates. But it's got a problem, genre-wise, because it's a boy's adventure, full of fear and innocence and exciting teenage daring-do, but it's too violent for kids to watch. And while the early parts are intense and fast-paced, it loses momentum and goes flat later.

The story only makes sense as a fairy tale or a myth. Two pairs of brothers come into symbolic, parallel conflict. One pair steals the other's horses and the older of the thieves kills the weaker, younger brother of the pair they victimize by reaching down from his horse and snapping his neck. The bereaved survivor hunts the horse-thief brothers down and kills the older one, taking the younger under his wing as they ride off into the sunset. Along the way there are passages of bracing physicality and rawness but also of extreme violence--not just the harrowing encounters between the opposing brothers but the brutality of a Cossack training camp, and after training, wartime atrocity when the Cossacks wipe out a village, leading the brother recruits to desert.

Adrien Jolivet, who plays Jakub, the stronger of the two brothers who join the Cassacks (and later get their horses stolen), has said that the actor who played the Cossack commander he fights with fists and saber (this is Michel Martin, I'm guessing) was an ex-fighter and they used real weapons, and it was all he could to do avoid getting killed. Jakub's younger brother Vladi (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) gets raped and beat up all the time. It's not a great role for Leprince-Ringuet, who's so appealing as the gay boy in Honoré's Chansons d'amour--he looks bigger than the wiry Jolivet, and all he gets to do is cringe and weep. To compensate for being a little too slight, though, Jolivet (excellent in his father Pierre's Zim and Co.) has an admirable feverish intensity that's convincing for "Le traque," the hunting down, after Roman (Grégoire Colin) and his damaged, horse-whisperer younger brother Elias (François-René Dupont) lures Vladi's and Jakub's horses away while they're gamboling in a lake after abandoning the Cossack life. (How that happened wasn't quite clear to me, or how they got to keep the horses.)

Roman's relationship to Elias' is similar to Jakub-Vladi's, except that Elias is a drunk and young seducer and Roman is really harsh and violent with him; it's his mean trick when they were little that damaged Elias' leg somehow.

Up to the theft of the horses things go pretty well. Then the film loses momentum and goes flat, even though the battle between Roman and Jakub that leads to Roman's slow demise is brutal and violent in the extreme. The effort at raw, unheroic realism is exhausting and repellent, and feels like sloppy editing. The two young men give each other deathly wounds, then struggle away on foot and horse only to exchange further blows and collapse in the horse thieves' underground hideaway. It leaves you feeling beaten down and hopeless. The closing shot of Jakub riding across the horizon with Elias riding a horse behind him almost saves things. It's a resolution in keeping with the film's mostly non-verbal style and fairy-tale overtones. There's a strange art-house purity about this effort, but I have a sick feeling that if Wald gets a lot more money he'll just make something like Laurent Boutonnat's vapid Jacquou le croquant.

Three of the young actors are already well known, especially Colin, an actor almost since birth, used repeatedly by Clair Denis. Leprince-Ringuet and Jolivet are both promising. François-René Dupont was a 17-year-old unknown, chosen for his presence, good looks, and the fact that he'd ridden horses from the age of six. Wald shows a certain panache, but his scenario is spotty and his editing questionable.

It would have been better to see this in a theater than on a computer via DVD. US title: In the Arms of My Enemy. It's distributed by Picture This!, a gay-friendly label who present it as a movie full of homoerotic scenes of sinewy, semi-nude young men. The young men are there, but there's nothing gay about the content.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.