Miguel Lafuente | Mi Hermano (My Brother) / 2015

a place for us

by Douglas Messerli

 

Miguel Lafuente (screenwriter and director) Mi Hermano (My Brother) / 2015 [23 minutes]

 

Ten years older that his 15-year-old brother, Alberto (Álvaro de Juan) has moved from his Spanish hometown to Berlin where he is happily living with an American named Nick (Jeff Frey).

     Having spent the night on the town the two have slept late, Nick finally awakening his lover to tell him his phone has been ringing for a long while. Alberto calls his mother only to discover that his little brother, of whom he has just been speaking, has died. His mother refuses to discuss the death on the phone, and he catches the first plane on which Nick can connect him back to his home in Spain.

     We recognize that something is wrong when he tells Nick that he can’t join him, and when he returns home that family friends keep asking about his girlfriend Vicky. “Nicky,” he corrects them. Obviously, he has not come out to his family.

      When he does begin to speak with his mother (Marta Belaustegui), everything appears to be wrapped in a mystery. Why has his brother’s body received an autopsy? How could he have slipped in the bathtub? And why was he drunk and his stomach filled with drugs in his own home? If Alberto is keeping a secret his parents seem to be hiding many.

      He calls Nick saying that there is simply something queer going on, admitting to his lover that he hates his family and can’t wait to get away again. After the burial, he sits with his mother and aunt in a dark room, in a dark house where everything is in black and browns. Only his mother’s blouse and his shirt are white. The aunt (Flora López) pours out the guilt: “It would done Luis some good to have had his big brother around.”

      Alberto enters his dead brother’s room to use his computer to print out his tickets, but needs the password. And slowly the truth begins to leak out. The password, his mother tells him, is “wild bulrush,” his father having “got it out of him.” Yes, the mother admits, he beat Luis to get it, wanting to check his computer. The boy was doing badly at school.

     When the brother asks why Luis’ friends weren’t at the funeral, his mother replies, “He didn’t get on with them as of late. They insulted him.” She refuses to respond when Alberto asks why they insulted him.

      When he pushes the print button to the laptop, the boy’s final statement appears on a piece of paper: “Now I’m free. Hugs and kisses.” What he has discovered at the very moment his father returns is a suicide note.

      By the time Alberto joins them in the other room for after-funeral sandwiches he is ready to accuse them of killing his brother. The father (Fernando De Juan), at first trying to deny things, finally admits “It wasn’t my fault he was gay. I was his father. I had to try and change him.” He continues to hint how they tortured and beat him to help him get better.

     Finally, the father tells his son: “You don’t like gays either. You’ve cursed them many times.” And suddenly Alberto has to realize that in his closeted world, he too has helped to kill his brother. By not admitting him own sexuality, not being there even as a model for his brother, he has helped create the homophobic world in which his parents live and that helped to kill their son.

     Alberto, breaking down can only now admit that is gay, that Nick is his boyfriend, that he, also as a child had contemplated suicide living with such a father and mother. When his mother attempts to hold him in his tearful breakdown, he pushes her away.

     In a sense both The Son and this film say the same thing each in their different ways. Openness, the truth about sexuality is always healing, while hiding and lying often destroy.

     Coincidentally, Alberto like Sebastien in Filip is a cartoonist by trade. And the last few frames of this movie portray an animated short he has created to help young boys understand that there is another world outside of homelife horrors, a world which will accept and embrace them. It’s a much needed message, as always. But at the end of family tragedy such as My Brother it seems simplistic and simply pinned on like a gold star for good behavior. I might have preferred that the film go just a little further in exploring the ramifications of staying silent when speaking out might have saved not only his brother’s life but helped redeem his own past sufferings. And the animated work he made is not obviously for the same audience that the film was conceived. Perhaps the last frame of this family’s devastation might have served as a greater solution to the problem than a simple nod to the notion of “Things get better.” Too often, for some I fear, they simply don’t improve that quickly and sufficiently For suffering from a sense of being outside of the world in which you live sometimes creates such painful wounds that they never can be healed. For those lonely beings life can never offer the truth that Filip learned at such an early age, that—to steal Leonard Bernstein’s repeated phrase from several of his works—“There is a place for us.”

 

Los Angeles, June 21, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2021).