Brothers

1948. A woman leaves her two sons at a house and goes, and does not come back. Michel is seven and Patrice five. The boys run from where they are being kept and go into the forest. They stay there. They find food, build a shelter, and let nobody see them. Seven years pass. Years later the two brothers are grown and separated. Michel can get no word of Patrice. He starts looking, and the trail goes north, to Canada. Olivier Casas directs; he wrote the screenplay with the novelist Olivier Adam. Mathieu Kassovitz and Yvan Attal are in the cast. It is a French production and opened on 24 April 2024. The ground is real; the story rests on the account of one of the brothers, Michel Lafregeyre, and Casas worked with him. The narrative runs on two planes of time; the childhood in the forest and the search in adulthood are interleaved. There is almost no dialogue in the forest sections and the narrative is left to the child actors. The matter it treats is the bond; the relation between the two brothers is survival itself and separation breaks it. The film does not use abandonment as material for drama; the mother is not at the centre. While keeping to the real events the narrative compresses some parts and the jumps in time are abrupt. Its limit is balance; the two planes are not equally strong and the adult section stays weak. Who it is for: viewers who like French drama and survival narratives drawn from real events. Who it is not for: the structure is in pieces, the pace uneven, and the ending sad.