When a friend sent me the screener to Nicolo Donato's feature debut, Brotherhood, I must admit I was primed to loathe it. Frequent readers of this blog may recall my views on the detrimental effects of the high-concept Hollywood model on American theatre. [ed note: See: High-Concept: Choking American Theatre to Death]. Suffice it to say, I think young filmmaker and young playwrights ought to be writing from the heart rather than cooking up some high-concept plot which, nine times out of ten, ends up feeling, well... just that. Cooked up.
So when I saw that Brotherhood was a Romeo & Juliet story turned gay AND within a Neo-Nazi Skinhead milieu, I almost didn't watch the thing.
To my surprise, the film is actually quite good. The writing is plausible and the acting is spot on. The Danish production stars Thure Lindhardt as a young officer in the Danish army who is forced into early retirement by rumors of his sexual indiscretions with his subordinates. The way in which Lars finds himself suddenly lost, without a career he had built his entire self-identity on, and then embraced by the Neo-Nazi Skinhead community whose values he does not share is handled quite plausibly.
When he is assigned to live with Jimmy (played by Swedish actor David Dencik) in a secluded beach house which they must renovate together, the two find themselves slowly drawn into a sexual relationship. The deliberate pacing of their mutual attraction and their acting upon it, is handled with far more subtlety than one would expect from such a young first-time director.
There's a scene toward the end of the film in which the leader of the cult and the owner of this house pays the two young men an unexpected early morning visit and discovers them sharing breakfast, shirtless at the kitchen table. The way in which he makes small talk while walking around the house, noting the bits of visual evidence of their coupledom all around the house, is chilling. The actor, Clause Flygare, does an expert job at conveying the power of someone who has no need to flaunt it. He says nothing of what he has seen, yet as he gets into his car and drives off, it is clear that nothing will ever be the same for these two young men. Their fate is sealed.
Nicolo Donato is 32 and although this is his first feature film, he has directed several shorts and music videos. If, like me, you loathe the notion that each new film must dig deeper to uncover an even more implausible “concept,” go see this film in spite of your reservations. Maybe like me, you’ll find that in spite of yourself, you’re drawn in to an honestly and intelligently drawn love story.
The film opens tomorrow night at the Cinema Village on 12th Street.