A Brother

Fifteen-year-old Tom is expecting another ordinary summer at the house his family goes to every year. This time another family comes to stay, and their seventeen-year-old son Félix moves into the middle of the daily routine. Over the course of the summer Félix opens doors Tom did not know were there; what starts out looking like an older brother turns into something else, and questions Tom had never put to himself come up. Victor Habchy, adapting a graphic novel, gets through eighty-two minutes without making a speech. It is about the summer an adolescent meets himself for the first time, told without explanation and without a lesson. The light of the holiday house and the repetition of the long afternoons matter as much as the story does. What is left at the end is the sense that this particular summer cannot be lived twice.