Still from Brother
Noni Ford discusses the role of grief in the Canadian drama Brother and the brutality found in the characters’ everyday lives.
How do we remember those we love? How does a family move on after the loss of a member? And how do we address the trauma of our past when it’s too painful to even talk about?
Those are just a few of the questions at the center of Clement Virgo’s Brother, an adaptation of the David Chariandy book which bears the same name. The film is a collection of scenes and periods of time in the lives of a small family composed of two brothers and their mom living in the Scarborough district of Toronto. While most of the focus is on the brothers, their mother informs a huge part of their upbringing and story as she injects light and a tough-as-nails approach to raising them. Her personal background of Jamaican immigration ties into their own struggles as there are sequences where they seek out more information about their absent father and their mother’s history. This tight, contained family argues, but there’s always love and care present too.
As we drift back and forth through time — from the boys as youngsters exploring the boundaries of their neighborhood and parsing out what the world is through late-night television news, to both as young adults in high school trying to define their futures and pursuing their passions — we see their dynamic shift. Francis, the oldest brother and the more daring one, is always pushing for more out of life and trying to teach Michael, his impressionable little brother, how to survive in Scarborough. Even as Francis makes his own path, though, we see his frustrations at the consistent police harassment and criticism the world keeps heaping on him. Michael, our film’s protagonist, is mostly socially isolated due to his extreme shyness and his aversion to any kind of confrontation. Francis, while loving, is also worried for his brother as he fights to keep him safe from the dangers that Scarborough presents.
Still from Brother
The story isn’t new; I myself have definitely seen the tale of siblings trying to survive the brutality of a heavy-crime and heavily policed working-class district in a major city quite a few times. What makes Brother unique and different is the tenderness with which each character is treated. Michael’s former girlfriend Aisha’s return to the building kicks off the story as she slowly begins the process of breaking down a lot of boundaries he has built since Francis’s death. The contrast between him as an adult and as a teenager when they met is distinct. Even as avoidant as he was in the past, there was still a desire in him to reach out to people like he reached out to her, and now his eyes are closed off, guarded, and absent of warmth. He is there to take care of his mother, and we see the love he still has for her, but there’s a strain on their relationship as both are in denial of how much their trauma has been unacknowledged and how much space it takes up in their lives every day. As Aisha attempts to open and heal some of their wounds, she unlocks a door to the past and brings in people like Jelly, Francis’s DJ collaborator, and old photos from childhood that Michael hasn’t perused since he was a child himself.
It can be easy to feel exasperated as an audience when Michael continues to try denying any and all catharsis that Aisha ushers into the apartment, but I understood it as his inability to release the pain he had been feeling for so many years. The pain is who he knows himself to be, and he has few things to grasp onto without it. While watching this film, I thought so much more about how we talk about trauma and whether “healing” is even the right word to use when it comes to addressing it. We do see the death at the center of the movie happen onscreen and I had to question for a moment whether it was needed, but after watching it through, I felt it was necessary. The event itself is the center of a domino effect going back into the past and forward into the future. It forms everything Michael is, isn’t, and could’ve been, so seeing it onscreen as opposed to just the aftereffects helps inform us of the cruelty of Michael’s life and of everyone’s reality.
At the close of the film, we end with the song “Ne me quitte pas,” mournfully sung by Nina Simone. Our characters are not quite settled or at a conclusion to their own stories, but they are at the close of a chapter. All of Michael’s objections to Aisha’s gentle pushes to open himself up to his and Francis’s past finally cause him to properly address his present. He cannot stay stagnant forever in his grief, and he is not the only one who loved Francis — his brother touched many people’s lives. The film ends with a scene from the very beginning, with Michael as always trying to keep up with Francis and Francis as always helping to share the world with his baby brother, both tied to each other eternally.
Brother will be screened at IU Cinema on October 27 and 28 as part of the New Americas Cinema series.