sneersnipe film review

Almost Two Brothers (Quase dois Irmaos) Lucia Murat Brazil 2004

For Stefan Zweig Brazil was the “country of the future”. With wit and resignation, ordinary Brazilians appended the observation “and it always will be!”. Lucia Murat’s Almost Two Brothers is the latest in a line of Brazilian films to analyse the reason why one of the most naturally rich countries in the world, in terms of both human and physical resources, is also one in which injustice and inequality is most enmired.

The quasi-brothers of the title are Miguel and Jorge. Miguel is white and middle-class, Jorge is black and from the favelas. This basic difference of birth played out over a sweep of fifty years determines the whole course of their interrelated lives. Miguel and Jorge meet as children through the friendship of their fathers, Miguel’s a samba-enthusiast, Jorge’s a famed sambista. Later they meet in jail where Miguel is a political prisoner, striving against the military dictatorship and Jorge is a criminal incarcerated for various petty crimes. In the present day, Miguel is a senator, well-off but unable to create the future of which he dreamt. Jorge is a favela king-pin, ordering hits and running drug deals from his cell. Murat’s film shifts between these periods, the 50s, 70s and 90s, in an attempt to trace the reasons why Brazil has reached the state of urban meltdown that characterises it today, particularly in the Rio-São Paulo megalopolis, the largest and most strife-ridden urban space in the world today.

Almost Two Brothers could be pitched a little like Memoirs of Prison meets City of God. Memoirs of Prison, like Gracialiano Ramos’s book and the Nelson Pereira dos Santos film adaptation, in how it shows life in the prison of Ilha Grande under Brazil’s military dictatorship, City of God in how it shows the related decline of a favela from poverty and criminality to misery and barbarity. The screenplay was co-written by the director and Paulo Lins, who wrote City of God, and there are many similarities between the two film’s portrayal of the predicament of the favelas. Almost Two Brothers does not have the visual flair of Fernando Meirelles’s film, but it does go further in its analysis of Brazil’s problems, linking the failure of 70s idealism to heal or find a solution to centuries of inequality to the intractability of Brazil’s social situation today. Almost Two Brothers is a profoundly desolate film, as its tragic close confirms. The one element of relief is the beauty and humour of the sambas that stud the story, here as in the life of many Brazilians the only relief from a profoundly depressing reality.

pmc