Brotherly love

We get to see lots of films about dying, but few as unassuming and direct as this. In a Paris hospital room, thirtysomething Thomas (Bruno Todeschini) is suffering from a rare and terminal blood disease. He has been estranged from younger brother, Luc (Eric Caravaca), for years, but over the course of the film they reunite and become inseparable, turning to each other to make sense of this illness, this end.

Other family members sit beside Thomas's bed looking frazzled, but they are just bit-players. It's the brothers who talk until late and smoke illicit cigarettes (so many of them, and so appreciatively).

Patrice Chéreau (La Reine Margot, Intimacy) is a stylistically diverse director but has a great talent for noticing everydayness. His last film, Intimacy, was set in a murky flat in Elephant and Castle, where he kept giving us close-ups of the kettle to show how smudged it was with the fingerprints of a thousand miserable tenants. You came away feeling grungy and jumbled. Son Frère is better - as frank, but more honest, just wonderful.

Like that kettle, Chéreau shows us needles, bruises and busted veins. He is particularly fond of the shot of a patient coming off a morphine drip. And yet it is done in such a gentle way - no incidental music, nobody wailing - that everything feels sweetly familiar. You're sure that you have been in this hospital room before. Perhaps you have: it is Paris, but it could be anywhere.

Actually, it has to be France, because in Britain we would never even try to make a movie about two middle-class brothers half-coping in a nice hospital. In British films, we hate to hold a mirror up to our middle-class nature. It is not our forte; we let our novels do that.

The effect of Son Frère's calmness is to take a lot of the grim taint off death. It is, in its way, incredibly comforting. Particularly when every other time we see a hospital on our screens (which we do, on TV, all week) the view is so melodramatic and noisy that it's like sparking up a chainsaw.

Son Frere
Cert: cert15