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Brother (dir. Balabanov, 1997)
Brother tells the story of Danila, a young man who's just returned from the war in Chechnya, and his exploits in St. Petersburg, where he's gone to visit his brother Viktor, a mafia hit-man who recruits him to "off" a rival Chechen mobster. Danila soon finds himself right at home in this land of violence, drugs, and stacks of cash. He befriends a drug dealer named Kat, and gets even "friendlier" with Sveta, a married woman whose husband is in jail. In addition to that, he manages to kill more than a few people between trips to the record shop in his search for an elusive CD by the band Nautilus.
Danila is played by the very popular Sergei
Bodrov Jr, son of the sucessful director Sergei
Bodrov Sr, who directed the Academy Award-nominated Prisoner
of the Mountains (1996), which catapulted Bodrov Jr. to stardom. The
musical score for Brother was composed by Vyacheslav Butusov, frontman
of the popular Russian band Nautilus. After a string of box office and critical
successes in front of the camera, Bodrov Jr. was just beginning a promising
directing career. When scouting locations for his second film as a director
in September of this year, tragically, he and many in his crew were killed in
an avalanche in the North Caucasus, where his film career began. Bodrov's last
completed film, also set in the Caucasus, reunited him again with Brother
and Brother 2 director Aleksei Balabanov (War,
2002). For coverage of Bodrov's death and reactions from Russia's film luminaries,
including Nikita Mikhalkov (Burnt By The Sun), see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2280434.stm.
Study questions:
Do you find it surprising that they made a sequel to this film? Why or why not?
What sort of factors usually motivate the decision to make a sequel?
What do you make of the permeating presence of the band Nautilus?
Does Danila's lamentation, "Those assholes, they slipped me a pirated copy" have a non-diegetic function [that is, one beyond the narrative of the film]? What would Beaumers' answer be?
How does Danila's cavalier attitude, cold decisiveness, and penchant for swift vigilante justice fit in with Russian ideals of leadership?
As this is our last film of the semester, how does Brother point to the profound transformation in Russian/Soviet/post-Soviet ideas about the function of cinema in society? about the character of on-screen heroes? Is there anything left of Socialist Realism and its positive hero?
This course has throughout been informed by the perspective of national film criticism. That is, we have examined films primarily, though not exclusively, as the expression of a national consciousness, a national aesthetic, and as the product of a particular national heritage. What makes Brother a Russian film, per se?
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