Jamais sans toi

The movie tackles with straight-forward candidness the biggest taboo of western societies: the incest. To top it all off, the relationship happens between two brothers. The movie struck me as extremely poetic, with great cinematography and a LOT of chemistry between the main actors. The love scenes will make you gasp with their intensity and sense of poetry, but the film lacks any real reason d'être.

The main subject in hand, with all of it's richness and subtleties, gets pushed to the side, while some other less interesting plot takes on from half the movie onwards.

I did enjoy the film quite a bit, especially for the ease with which it talks about a very taboo subject.

Oh, and I must mention the main actors are, naturally, extremely hot.

Being Muslim and open-minded, I found this true gay brotherly love movie quite a great movie. Gay love making is not cheap and the story is quite normal and impressive too. Not surprised it won awards.

The filmmaker starts off with an intriguing premise. How much would love flourish if we lived in a world uncomplicated by belief systems that thrive on shame and conformity? In my eyes, the filmmaker is a dreamer. Not a realist. And it was refreshing and fascinating to watch as the story unfolded. It was profound.

The story begins with a boy at the age of six who is escorted by a nurse to see his newborn brother. Immediately, the filmmaker is setting up the rules of his idyllic world. And the rules are consistent throughout. The father is nowhere to be seen. In fact, there are no adults other than an impartial nurse who leads the boy to the person who will ultimately be the love of his life.

The six year-old brother looks into his baby brother's eyes through the viewing window and a profound connection is formed. The filmmaker makes his first point. Could this mysterious thing we call love start even before birth? In most of the best love films that I've seen, and I've seen plenty, when two lovebirds meet the love of their life they have that experience of, haven't we met before? Or, I feel like I've known you all my life.

I won't go into the whole story but I was fascinated by the filmmaker's decision to leave as much conflict out of the picture as possible. He showed us hints of potential conflicts but wisely didn't emphasize them. It was a brave choice. Abranches' vision would prefer to keep the boy's perpetually in the womb of their mother. Which is another important theme throughout the story.

Abranches give us a vision of his Garden of Eden before the fall and the Great Conflict. Before Adam hid himself in the bushes when God walked the grounds and he asked Adam, why are you hiding? I'm naked. And God became angry, who told you thou wast naked? What kind of world would that be like? I can only imagine but I caught a glimpse of it up there on the big silver screen. I highly recommend From Beginning to End.

I don't understand why mutually consenting sex between brothers near the same age is a big deal. It's not as if they would produce deformed offspring. That particular taboo makes no sense to me. I'm not advocating gay incest, but horror at the idea of sex between brothers – even in a movie, and even among gay men – mystifies me. I've never been at all attracted to my own brother, but two brothers' falling in love in a movie does not make me the least bit uncomfortable. I don't feel compelled to try to twist it into something else that's more acceptable.

People who say it's easy to forget that Francisco and Thomás are brothers in the latter half of the movie must be TRYING to forget it, because the movie never stops affirming the fact that that's what they are. Fighting that battle while trying to enjoy a movie must detract a lot from the enjoyment.

This is a flawed but interesting and unusual movie, and I can understand why even the many positive reviews it gets have trouble describing it. It has been called a fairy tale because Francisco and Thomás seem to live in a dream world as cut off from the real world as Sleeping Beauty in her castle. But aren't all young lovers like that? Isn't that what love and hormones do to young people? Doesn't the rest of the world tend to fall away when the beloved comes into view? That's how it was when I was young.

So to say that this is a fairly tale is simply to say that it is a love story. It's an unusual love story, but fundamentally it is just like any other romance movie. If anything, its depiction of the all-consuming ecstasy of young love is MORE realistic than most movies are, not less.

Others have emphasized the parents' evident oblivion or even acquiescence to what is going on under their noses, but that seems to me like just another symptom of the irrational taboo I mentioned earlier. It's like: "What those boys are doing is WRONG! Why don't their parents stop it?" But, again, I ask: Why? Who is hurting whom? Nobody that I can see.

When they're children, they simply love each other and love to be together, and they are freely affectionate with each other. Is that bad? Why? Should the mother slap her son when he kisses his younger brother on the head or puts his arm around him or holds him while they sleep? Why? Is fighting better? Is sibling rivalry better than sibling affection? Evidently it is to many people.

Neither of those is what I see as a weakness in this movie. It's true that the movie is unreal, but what seems most unreal to me is not the brothers' relationship with each other or with their parents. That's just an extraordinarily loving and mutually accepting family, which is almost never seen in a movie or in real life but should be everybody's ideal of what a family ought to be. If that's not the unconditional love people rave about nowadays, I don't know what is.

What seems most unreal to me is the other adults' relationships with each other, the fantastically loving relationships between exes and in-laws and friends who are NOT in love with each other, who are NOT caught up in the heady ecstasy of hormones and young love. That excess of affection is just plain weird.

Another weakness I see is in the dialog. The core story about the brothers is fine – it's a love story – but what people say to each other is stilted and awkward, not at all the way real people talk. It's like the way people talk in TV commercials. And the problem is not just in the English subtitles, which actually are very good: what they're saying in Portuguese sounds just as phony.

And the final weakness I see is in the direction. The director seems to be trying to make something besides JUST a love story, but what that other something is never comes clear. It feels as if he is intentionally trying to make it an allegory, or an epic myth, or a ballet, or something else abstract that wrestles constantly with the extremely simple love story which the movie actually is.

The scene in which the adult brothers slowly undress for the first time as they face each other across the room is particularly strange, like something out of a kabuki performance. That obscure tension between what the movie is and what the director is trying to make it be doesn't ruin the movie, but it IS distracting.

All four actors who play the two brothers as children and then as adults are very good and very beautiful, inside and out. What the director did an EXCELLENT job of is getting straight actors (which I assume they all are) to be so convincingly loving toward each other. Every affectionate gesture, every touch, every loving look is totally convincing. That could NEVER happen in an American or Canadian movie, or even in a European movie, and I've never seen it in any other movie from Latin America. It is a unique and astonishing accomplishment.

The director also gets credit for the movie's other great accomplishment, which is simply that it got made. A movie about love, passion, unshakable devotion, loyalty, innocence, tenderness and limitless generosity between two men is rarer than hens' teeth. The scene in which they exchange wedding rings alone together at home is one of the sweetest, sexiest scenes I have ever seen. I have never seen any other movie that even comes close to the love between these two men, and I have seen hundreds and hundreds of gay movies. This is far from the best of them, but it is the most wonderful.

I got this movie out on DVD without knowing too much about it and I was absolutely blown away. It is such a touching and romantic movie. I know it has taboo topics but they are handled so gently and with such acceptance by the film makers and the the characters within the story. It truly moved me in a way a film has never done for me before. It is probably not for everyone due to some of it's taboo content, but honestly, it should be viewed regardless. It is such an exquisite portrayal and will really make you think. I cannot praise this movie more highly. Forget the mind-numbing exploitative offerings of The Hangover or Bridesmaids, and see what great film can accomplish.