Brother

Plot synopsis:
In the autumn of 1997, Danila Bagrov (Sergei Bodrov Jr.) returns to his small hometown of Priozersk following his demobilization from the Russian Army after the First Chechen War. Before he reaches home, he ends up in a fight with security guards, after he accidentally walks onto the set of a music video for the band Nautilus Pompilius. After Danila rejects a job offer from the chief of the local militsiya, who was a classmate of Danila's deceased father, he is released, on the condition that he will find work within the week. His mother insists that he travels to St. Petersburg to seek out his successful older brother Viktor, whom his mother is confident will help him make a living.
Danila travels to the city, but his attempts to make contact with Viktor are unsuccessful. Instead, he travels around the city and befriends several people from a very wide urban spectrum: Kat (Mariya Zhukova), an energetic drug addict and party-girl, and "German" Hoffman (Yury Kuznetsov), a homeless street vendor whom Danila helps after a thug attempts to extort him. Danila knocks the thug unconscious and takes a revolver from his pocket.
Unbeknown to their mother, Viktor (Viktor Sukhorukov) is an accomplished hitman who goes by the street name "Tatar" but is growing too independent and is starting to irritate his mob boss "Roundhead" (Sergei Murzin). His latest target is "Chechen", a Chechen mafia boss who was recently released from prison and runs an open-air market. Roundhead, who is unhappy with the amount of money that Viktor demanded for the hit, orders his thugs to secretly watch him.
When Danila finally finds Viktor's apartment, he is welcomed by Viktor. To avoid exposure, Viktor passes his assignment to his brother, gives him money to settle into the city, and then lies to him that the Chechen has been extorting from him, and asks Danila to perform the hit. Although Danila claims that his army service was spent at the headquarters as a clerk, he carries out the task professionally. First, he asks German to find him a room in a communal flat in the city center (much to the dismay of the old alcoholic landlord who threatens to shoot German with his vintage hunting rifle, as revenge for World War II). He then constructs a makeshift silencer out of a plastic soda bottle and an oil filter, as well as a decoy firecracker out of a matchbox. Finally, he follows Chechen and, despite the latter's security, takes him out without being spotted. As Danila makes his exit, Roundhead's thugs spot him and chase him. Making his escape, Danila jumps into a freight tram and, despite being wounded in the abdomen, manages to kill one of the pursuing thugs.
The tram driver, a woman named Sveta (Svetlana Pismichenko), helps Danila escape. Later, despite her marriage to an abusive husband, the two begin an affair. Danila later recovers, with German's help. With the money given to him by Viktor after the hit, he begins to enjoy St. Petersburg, gives his provincial image a makeover, goes to a concert with Sveta to see his favorite band, Nautilus Pompilius, and manages to scare away her husband. He meets up with Kat to go to a nightclub and then smokes cannabis in an afterparty, where he taunts a French tourist whom he mistakes for an American. The night ends with him sleeping with Kat.
Roundhead's loss of a thug and the fact that Viktor employed Danila to carry out the hit aggravates him even more. He decides to draw him into a combined raid. Once again Viktor, suspecting a trap, passes the job to Danila. The two thugs raid the apartment, but their main target is away. While they wait, in an apartment on the floor above, a party is taking place with several well-known Russian rock stars. A young radio director, Stepan (Andrey Fedortsov) mistakes the raided flat for the party flat and is almost killed by the thugs, who take him as a hostage. Vyacheslav Butusov, the lead singer of Nautilus Pompilius, makes the same mistake, but Danila instead follows Butusov above and relaxes in the friendly musical atmosphere. Realizing the balance between right and wrong, he comes downstairs and finds that the thugs have just killed their main target, and are about to do the same with Stepan. Instead, Danila kills both thugs. Danila and Stepan drag the corpses to the Smolensky Lutheran Cemetery, where German and his friends dwell. Once again, German helps Danila by disposing of the bodies.
Roundhead is furious upon finding out what happened. Instead of going after Tatar, he decides to track Danila and intercepts Sveta's tram. They later raid her apartment, where his men beat and rape her, and learn his phone number, as well as his address. A henchman nicknamed "Mole" ambushes Danila near his apartment building, but the bullet hits Danila's music player, giving him a chance to fire back and kill Mole. Realizing that staying home is unsafe, he travels to Sveta's house and is shocked at her state. Initially thinking it was her husband, he then learns who was responsible and realizes that the only way they could have tracked Sveta was when he returned a phone call from her home telephone to his brother.
At the same time, Roundhead raids Viktor's apartment and forces him to call Danila at gunpoint, so that he comes to pick up his payment. Realizing the depth of the situation, Danila decides to end it all at once. He goes back to the communal room that he was renting, buys the rifle from the old man, converts it into a sawed-off shotgun, and replaces the duck-hunting pellets with nailheads. At Viktor's apartment, he makes easy work of Roundhead and two of his henchmen and tells the surviving thug to warn the rest of the gang that anyone who hurts his brother will be killed. In reply, the thug tells him that it was Viktor who turned him in.
Danila forgives his brother, gives him some of the money from Roundhead's suitcase (keeping the rest for himself) and then tells him to return home and to work for the militsiya. Danila decides to go to Moscow, as St. Petersburg, according to Viktor, "is a pretty town, but provincial nonetheless". Once again he visits Sveta, intending to take her with him, but her husband has returned and is beating her. Seeing Danila, he challenges him to a fight, but before he can come closer, Danila fires a shot into his leg. Sveta rushes to her husband and begins to treat his wound. Danila urges her to come with him, but she tells him to get out and never come back. He leaves her a Nautilus Pompilius CD. He then meets up with German, converses with him about the influence of the city on its residents, saying that everyone is weak here, to which German replies that the city is an evil that drains the strength from those who enter it. Danila offers him money, but German declines, saying "What's good for the Russian is death for the German". Before he leaves the city, he finds Kat to say goodbye. She is indifferent to his departure, but he gives her money nonetheless.
The last scene of the film shows Danila walking out of a snow-covered forest. He hitches a ride to Moscow on a passing Kamaz truck. As he chats up with the driver, the final shot is of the winter road stretching far into the wilderness.

Tags: psychedelic

Review:
Humorous, Yet Touching.
This a simple story told in narration by a brother, who describes growing up and his odd family.
It is both humorous and tragic.
Most of all, it was captivating and very touching.
It's very quiet, and you have to give it your full attention.The narrator describes everyone in his family, all of whom are shown in claymation form.
Most of the shots are fairly quick and they are stills.
There is very little movement in this, just one "snapshot" after another.
Everyone is odd mainly because of some physical affliction, so the humor is dark.
The claymation figures are "cute" and add much-needed lightness to a story that, basically, is fairly dark, especially at the end.
Actually, the claymation figures are more than cute: they're fantastic.
You'll laugh and marvel at each figure, from the poor brother and his weird eyeglasses, to the boys' pet lizard.Overall, this is different; it's excellent and it will keep you riveted to the screen, wondering what odd tidbit you'll hear next about this family.This is one of a trilogy done by the writer-director Adam Elliot.
I haven't seen the other two but if they are anywhere near as good as this, I look forward to seeing them..
Weird but very, very captivating.
This is a very strange short film that is also very captivating.
Oddly, however, when this film was shown on cable TV, it was called "Uncle" but this is NOT the correct title, but "Brother".
Uncle was another video by the same director--part of a trilogy made up of UNCLE, COUSIN and BROTHER.The film is a strange journey through claymation into the world of the narrator as he talks about his childhood.
All the family is introduced, but the bulk of this film focuses on the narrator's odd brother.
This brother had a lazy eye, was an asthmatic and was a very strange kid--most of which made me laugh--especially when the claymation animation was so cute and enlivened the narration.
However, at the end, a poignant moment occurs--making this a very sad tale indeed.While there have been many claymation films before AND many which had better animation, rarely was I as touched or laughed as much as I did here.
I particularly liked the rather dead-pan narration and the incredible weirdness of the animation.
A sweet little film--it got me looking for COUSIN and UNCLE so I could complete the trilogy..
What a brilliant short!.
I was deeply moved by this movie, certainly the most powerful in the Trilogy.
I especially like the way Elliot treats the subject of disease as though it were a character trait.
The timing between the narration and claymation is very effective.
Watching this tragicomedy a second time, I couldn't decide whether to laugh or cry.
Most claymation movies are light-hearted and silly.
I never thought claymation could be used to spark such intense emotion but I guess it's the artist behind the medium who should truly be commended..
tragicomic memories.
Adam Elliot's childhood was certainly shrouded in darkness, his entire family seems to have been prone to some misfortune, and yet, in all of this darkness, Elliot is able to find plenty of absurdity, humour, and heart.
'Brother' is the third installment in his autobiographical trilogy.
A deadpan narrator tells us of his brother and recounts scattered events and memories and details over the course of seven strange, engaging, and emotional minutes.
Bordering on tears, I finished this short film.
The ending is greatly disquieting, while the majority of the film, while extremely dark and even morbid in parts, is rather humourous (it's definitely the most consistently funny of the trilogy, though the other two parts are filled with plenty of humour as well).
Such an ending gives this film even further strength than it already had, and what is left unsaid is really where its power lies..
Ouch, very touching.
This short is one of those creations that is just too personal and lovely to entirely accredit a score to, really.
However, it's not so personal that it doesn't have any place to connect with the audience with (like another animated short I've seen where the guy went on talking about his father in the most uninteresting way for a good twenty minutes).This short is kind of beautiful mostly in its simplicity.
The narrator just describes a person in his life as a pretty simple story, "We lived here, we did this, I remember this and this, and then this happened." The feeling of loss and grief, but happiness with past memories, pervades, especially in the grayish cinematography.
Despite the fact that the clay characters are very oddly shaped, they don't come across to me as caricatures, they seem much more like Elliot wasn't trying to make them seem particularly special...
just individually important.--PolarisDiB.
The final chapter.
This is "Brother", an 8-minute animated short film in black-and-white from the year 2000.
So this one is already over 15 years old.
The writer and director is Adam Elliot and this short film here is the final chapter of his trilogy on male relatives.
Ot followed "Uncle" and "Cousin".
My favorite and the only one I liked was "Cousin".
My problem with "Brother" here is that it occasionally felt as if the focus is too much on other family members.
This should actually have been almost exclusively about the narrator's brother and it is not.
I also think that this approach only works well and stays interesting for a couple minutes and 8 minutes may have exceeded that maximum already.
In any case, the atmosphere and tone is very similar to the previous two and death plays a big role again as well.
All in all, I was not entertained or touched watching this short film (in contrast to the wonderful "Harvie Krumpet").
I give it a thumbs-down.
Not recommended..
Excellent short, the third of three shorts in a series by Adam Elliot.
This is the last short in Adam Elliot's set of shorts about members of his family.
There will be spoilers ahead:This is perhaps the saddest and oddest of the three shorts by Adam Elliot as he relates stories about his family.
He has a quadriplegic father, an asthmatic older brother with a lazy eye and an over-burdened mother.The bulk of the short concerns Elliot's brother, who is an odd child with more than his fair share of problems.
In addition to his asthma and eye problem, he has lice and is laughed at in school for his pains.
The two brothers do the typical things most brothers do.This short is somewhat more odd and disturbing than Cousin or Uncle.
We meet the neighbor with hydrocephaly, who has a quirky view of just who will wind up in Hell, his brother's best friend in school and an interesting bully.
The end of the short is incredibly sad and typically twisted at the same time.This short is available on the Harvie Krumpet DVD as well as being a part of The Animation Show, Volume1.
This short and both DVDs are most recommended.