Brother and Sister (Arnaud Desplechin, 2022) (Patreon)

There has been a strong surge of anti-Desplechin sentiment brewing over the past few years. The critical response to his last few films, along with the fact that major film festivals have started ignoring them, would suggest that something like a consensus is forming, that Desplechin is essentially washed up. And while I would agree that the evidence suggests that he is unlikely to once again achieve the heights of My Sex Life, Kings and Queen, or A Christmas Tale, Desplechin is hardly down for the count. 

I will say that some of the critical responses to Brother and Sister are a bit confounding. It was considered a major bomb last year at Cannes, and the reviews all suggest that viewers were looking to Desplechin for some kind of dramatic realism and, when they found nothing of the sort, decided that the filmmaker was to blame. Verisimilitude is a strange ask from a director who has given us, among other things, Mathieu Amalric breakdancing in a mental hospital, Summer Phoenix eating glass, and Benicio del Toro as a neurotic Blackfoot Indian. This was never supposed to be Bergman, folks.

We can add to the above list of provocative head-scratchers the fact that [SPOILER] after smoking opium in his parents's house, Louis (Melvil Poupaud), the titular brother, climbs out a window and flies over the city at night, hovering outside a hospital where his mother (Nicolette Picherel) lay in a coma. Brother and Sister comes out of the gate with all guns blazing, starting with the death of Louis's six-year-old son. We see only immediate aftermath, as family and friends come to pay their respects. But when Louis' older sister Alice (Marion Cotillard) arrives, with their mother and her husband Borkman (Francis Leplay), Louis violently throws them out. It seems that Alice never met the kid, and it remains unclear whether this is the source of their rift, or just another result of it.

Reviews have complained that Desplechin never tells us exactly why Alice and Louis hate one another. Indeed, it is treated as a grandiose absence, the prime mover of a family drama that is somehow beyond explanation and, most likely, incredibly petty. This hatred organizes the entire family, with Alice and Louis taking care never to show up at the same place at the same time. But more integrally, their antipathy organizes Brother and Sister itself. Major events, like the hospital stay and eventual death of their parents, are split into two parallel trajectories. The film's editing is fractured and fidgety, almost working overtime to insure that the warring parties are never in the frame at the same time. Desplechin is using this rupture as a way to deconstruct Brother and Sister's narrative cohesion, forcing other characters into one orbit or the other, for reasons they barely understand.

The one major exception to this rule is Fidèle (Benjamin Siksou), Alice and Louis' younger brother. He serves as the thin tissue barely holding the family together, but it's suggested that he can do this only because he has a comparatively weak personality. Alice, a successful stage actress, admits in one interlude that when Louis' writing finally became recognized, she resented him. While it's possible that both Louis and Alice want to be the only genius in the family (Fidèle is a gym coach), this is just another fragment that Desplechin never definitively identifies as The Problem.

In truth, it could be as simple as this: Alice and Louis are both huge assholes, and neither can tolerate the space taken up by the other. Both characters are quite unlikable, given to preposterous histrionics and sudden outbursts. Alice is self-involved and vain, abruptly ending an interview when Louis comes up, and later she befriends a poor Romanian girl (Cosmina Stratan) who is obsessed with her acting, going for a drink and rambling on about herself, as if the girl were suitable for trusting with secrets simply because she is so unimportant. Louis, meanwhile, berates his dying father (Joël Cuddenec) for being mean to him on his birthdays as a kid, and goes off on his young nephew (Max Baisette de Malglaive) for never standing up for him to his mother. Louis rages, and Alice experiences psychosomatic fainting and nausea. 

In short, Brother and Sister is an expulsive melodrama about two drama queens, both of whom exhibit such entitlement that they render the emotions and desires of everyone around them irrelevant. A number of reviews have criticized Desplechin's script (co-written with Julie Peyr), as being bizarrely verbose and implausible. While it's true that it cannot compare with Desplechin's best writing, it seems unfair to knock Brother and Sister for failing to conform to conventional dialogue. The film has certain real-life crises at its core -- grief, addiction, unresolved baggage -- but none of these can ever really gain purchase as meaningful, and this is by design. The fact that their parents' death has interceded in Alice and Louis' lives is treated like an intolerable inconvenience. 

These are two artists whose greatest creative achievement is their mutual antipathy. They are, as they say, committed to the bit, and Desplechin is wise never to allow this fury to explain itself with some trivial rationale. Louis and Alice's hatred is a florid, Rococo painting in all black, a dark, orotund spray of bile that bypasses surface reality and becomes something comically expressionistic. There's stuff to dislike here, for sure -- the siblings' unfortunate postscript comes to mind -- but as Jonathan Rosenbaum once said, don't dismiss good baba ganoush like it's bad peanut butter.