Marcus Schwenzel | Bruderliebe (Brotherly Love) / 2009

checking out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marcus Schwenzel (screenwriter and director) Bruderliebe (Brotherly Love) / 2009 [16.35 minutes]

 

German film director Marcus Schwenzel’s, a beautifully filmed work of melancholia with cinematography by Eduardo Ramierz Gonzalez, is oddly described by the few online sites that even mention this 2009 masterwork as a story of “two brothers with different intentions.” However, I’m not sure what “intentions” either of them might have had or how those intentions were different from one another. Someone obviously was confused about or is purposely attempting to confuse a rather straightforward, if very sad tale, of two gay brothers who fell in love and, to the “utter shock” of their community, were found having sex with one another.

     It begins with the still extremely handsome elder brother, Peter (Thorsten Feller), arriving in his former hometown, having been just released from prison. The voiceover tells us that the only person he ever loved was his brother Ben.

       He checks into a local hotel, almost immediately and quite without intention seducing the hotel clerk, Raoul (Levi Meaden) who reports that since it’s off season he doesn’t have many customers and he’s bored. He gets off, so he tells the new man he’s registering, in an hour.

     But even before he relieves some of his tension with the sexual interlude with Raoul, Peter has visions of his brother Ben (Anthony Gorin) presumably killing himself since the voice over—which helps to tell this story, along with the clippings Peter carries with him, later discovered by Raoul, tell the story as opposed to narrative dialogue—observes “I could not protect you.” So in a sense, we already have most of the story. What remains are simply further details, an expression of Peter’s guilt, and ruminations of what couldn’t perhaps have ended any differently given the absurd restrictions of most societies throughout the world. Brotherly love of the kind that this tale tells is forbidden.

      Wandering around the village in the cold of winter, drinking directly from a large bottle of wine, Peter recalls the joyful times between him and his brother, a run in the park, pausing in the park gazebo for a brief loving interlude.     

     Soon after the two of them check into the local gym where they undress together with intention of sharing their pleasure in one another’s bodies without knowing that they are being tracked and followed by a group of local boys, whose fingers we see pulling themselves up for a view of what is happening in the cubicle.

       Peter revisits the gym where the event happened, describing another kind of truth to his brother: “You are not dead, and I am not alive,” Ben being still completely alive in Peter’s memory, but Peter himself walking around like a dead man with no will and no meaning left in his life.

 

    Returning the next evening to Peter’s hotel room for sex, Raoul finds his new friend still out and reads articles from his notebook whose headlines scream out that the then 18-year-old was sent for three years to prison for brother love: “Bruderliebe! 3 Jahre Haft fuer 18 Jachringen.” Another headline reads “Jüngerer Bruder begeht Selbstmord nach Verurteilung im Incest – Skandal!” (Younger brother kills himself following incest sex – Scandal!).

      Peter, meanwhile, after the gym has closed, goes for either an endlessly long swim in their Olympic size pool, his body to be discovered the next morning; or eventually comes up for air, released, for a while, of his guilt and never-ending pain. I’d like to imagine the latter since I see myself as an optimist; but given the torture our society has put this man through I can only presume he chooses to entirely forget, to become the dead man he describes himself as.

    How can such true love of a brother be so terribly punished by a society that pretends to espouse love as its major moral value? One need only to live long enough to know love is very seldom chosen over fear and hate. In the end, these boys had no familial secrets except that they did truly love one another, the younger in no way being forced into sharing what he felt. The “different intentions” attributed in the several entries about this film, I presume, were someone’s attempt to suggest that younger brother Ben was somehow not totally aware about what was happening between the two of them. But the film does not in any way suggest that.

      This film was produced by the Prague Film School.

 

Los Angeles, September 18, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (2021).