Bruder

Post-Soviet Russia's rough crime drama. I certainly don't know the St. Petersburg, it digs into a poor society's underbelly trying to find its feet. With a very black sense of humor, dark and grim. The late Sergei Bodrov Jr. with a strong support cast around him is great in the lead. You see, you know... Apart from Eisenstein and Tarkovsky, there is Russian cinema. One more thing... If it had been done in any other country, it would have been restored by the Americans as a dumb, violent man.

If you were in S.Petersburgh in the early nineties, you feel this movie has been able to grab a cubic meter of air of the city at that time, pack it, and give it to its viewers to breathe. The effect is physical. I can feel the smell of the wet dusty roads, the moulded no man's land of stairways in post soviet blocks of flats and much more. Apart from this high accuracy in physical sensation, the movie is multi-layered (you can watch in it a "boevik" action movie, a social analysis of the period, even a Dostoevki-like study on the value of brotherhood and after all, a unique picture of what Russia is, was, and will be. Those who can enjoy it in original will find some tasty bits of Russian irony and humor.

This Russian film about a young hitman in St. Petersburg could just as easily have been set in London or New York; killing for profit's the same everywhere, isn't it, and yet Aleksey Balabanov's terrific thriller "Brother" seems peculiarly Russian. You wouldn't really find these characters in London or New York and what happens here wouldn't necessarily happen there, at least not in this fashion.

Danila, (Sergey Bodrov, excellent) is a young ex-soldier who gets into trouble at home so his mother packs him off to live with his older, well-off brother in St. Petersburg. The thing is, however, big brother is a hitman and very soon Danila is, too. The thrills Balabanov serves up aren't the ones you expect. This is a character study like Melville's "Le Samourai" but our young anti-hero is a rank amateur compared with Delon, although he does know his way around a gun. Danilo thinks he's a big shot but he's just another young boy with a passion for rock music, (the film has a terrific score). Even the ending isn't the conventional one. See this.

This film was a blockbuster hit in Russia, for many reasons that international viewers might not understand. "Brother" is a film that speaks directly to Russians (especially the urban population) about the time period directly following the fall of the Soviet Union. This was a lawless time, full of uncertainty about everything including whether your life would be ended by a random criminal on the street. It also suggests the Russian disillusionment with the Chechen War (well, the first one of the 1990s).

Balabanov has created an intense crime drama that attempts to answer Dostoyevsky's "eternal question": what does one do in a lawless society? Danila, the hero, has lost his innocence during the war in Chechnya. In this way he really represents all of Russia in that he has lost his heritage and his identity, and now must make his way in the new Russia. Like many others at the time, Danila turns to crime in order to survive.

The most heart-wrenching thing about "Brother" is that it has an incredible likeness to the reality of life in St. Petersburg in the early 1990s. Though on the surface it seems to be full of senseless violence, Danila's search for identity (that mirrors Russia's) calls for an honest picture of the hard life of the period.

One thing that some other reviewers failed to comment on is the way that you discover just who Danila is - he covers-up the fact that he saw action in Chechnya and always says he served far from combat. This story is really about the Russian crime situation LESS than about an entire generation of people who served in Afghanistan and Chechnya ('94-'96 and '99-present). This movie will be misunderstood by many Westerners (I am Russian myself) because it does not fit the traditional Hollywood screenplay style - and its characters do not behave themselves like most Hollywood characters would in a crime drama. There is a very Slavic quality in this film that I am VERY happy to see preserved and NOT Westernized. (You must see Brat2 to learn more about Brat.)