The Sisters Brothers - Film Review Alliance Française French Film Festival

The Sisters Brothers - Film Review Alliance Française French Film Festival

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Posted 2019-03-07 by Andrew Situfollow

Wed 13 Mar 2019 - Wed 10 Apr 2019

The Sisters Brothers - Film Review (Alliance Française French Film Festival)

(Please note this review contains spoilers )


Once again, the annual Alliance Francaise French Film Festival comes to town.

This year, there are 54 films being shown in the Perth leg of the festival, which runs from 13 March to 10 April. It is also the thirtieth anniversary of this event in Australia. Presented by Alliance Francaise in Australia, AF FFF2019 offers a selection of films for a wide range of audiences, including families and children. Several prominent French directors will be returning this year, including Jacques Audiard (AF FFF2016 entrant [i] Dheepan [/i]). Most of Audiard's work was set in France, but his latest offering, [i] The Sisters Brothers [/i] is set in America during the Gold Rush of the 1850s.

[i]The Sisters Brothers[/i] is one of three English-language offerings at AF FFF2019, the other two being [i] High Life [/i] and [i] The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir [/i]. It is directed by Audiard and produced by John C. Reilly ([i] Terri [/i]), who also stars as one of the main characters. This film is an adaptation of Canadian-born Patrick deWitt 's novel of the same name. The Sisters brothers, Eli (Reilly) and Charlie ( Joaquin Phoenix , [i] Her [/i]) are a pair of assassins from Oregon who carry out assignments for a mysterious person known only as the Commodore ( Rutger Hauer , [i] Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets [/i]). Their mission is to hunt down and kill Hermann Warm ( Riz Ahmed , [i] Una [/i]), a prospector who has devised a secret formula that can revolutionise how gold is collected from water bodies.



At the same time, another hitman in the service of the Commodore, John Morris ( Jake Gyllenhaal , [i] Nightcrawler [/i]), has also been sent to track Warm. His task is to secure Warm and hand him over to the SIsters brothers However, Morris abandons the job and goes into business with Warm, much to the chagrin of Eli and Charlie. Eli, the more sensible of the brothers, starts getting second thoughts about continuing the mission, pitting him against the more reckless Charlie, whose antics often put both brothers in danger. This causes a lot of tension between them and is a recurring theme throughout the movie.

Although Eli and Charlie manage to locate Warm and Morris, they are forced to protect the latter two from a band of armed mercenaries. Warm and Morris thus offer the Sisters brothers a half-share in their business venture and show them how to use the formula to extract gold. Unfortunately, the formula is highly corrosive and both Warm and Morris are fatally burnt when they get exposed to it, while Charlie loses his hand. The brothers decide to return to Oregon, while pursued by agents sent by the Commodore. Upon arriving in Oregon, they discover that the Commodore has passed away and end up paying respects to him before returning for good to their mother's ( Carol Kane , [i] Gotham [/i]) house.

The film differs from the book in that the Commodore is only shown dead in the film, whereas Eli drowns him in the book. The film shows the Old West in its lawless glory, in which anyone who kills a man ends up with the victim's fathers or friends on his tail, usually ending badly. Phoenix slips effortlessly into the character of Charlie Sisters, whose long-suffering brother has to cover up for him every time he gets on somebody's wrong side. Ahmed exudes idealism as Warm, who wants to use the profits from gold-mining to build a cooperative community in Texas. The screenplay would certainly give Quentin Tarantino a run for his money. Venturing into unfamiliar territory thus has not been a failure for Audiard.

Another Western-themed film at AF FFF2019 would be the Joachim Lafosse -directed Keep Going starring Virginie Efira . For the kids, there is the animated Asterix: The Secret of the Magic Potion .



#cinema
#film_festivals
#film_reviews
#movie_reviews
#perth_city
#march
!date 13/03/2019 -- 10/04/2019
%wnperth
105770 - 2023-06-12 12:05:43

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