From the evidence of Tom Fassaert’s filmography, a film camera is the best tool for confronting family trauma, although it can never fully resolve it. With his prior documentary feature A Family Affair [+lire aussi :
critique
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interview : Tom Fassaert
fiche film], and now his IFFR Limelight world premiere Between Brothers, the Dutch director has been able to capture quite extraordinary and intimate revelations from his immediate family, heart-to-heart conversations not undermined by the fact we witness them ourselves. This time focusing on his father Rob and paternal uncle René’s unique bond, after A Family Affair’s maternal reunion, Between Brothers is an insightful and tender consideration of family mores, despite our awareness of the director’s second-hand perspective, and how the categorical truth may remain forever elusive.

The feature’s key source of tension comes from the participants’ balance of contentment and insecurity, cautious of turning over the proverbial “stone” to see what’s being repressed. Through the film’s ten-year timespan, Rob is mainly glimpsed in his early seventies, a successful psychologist now in semi-retirement. Fassaert notes the irony of his uncle’s state, whilst avoiding glibness: suffering from an unspecified psychiatric disorder, although with some evident traits of autism, René has been an outpatient for several decades after a period of institutionalisation, with stabilising care coming from social workers and his younger brother’s expertise. With the death of their mother Marianne at the film’s start, Fassaert observes how the brothers initially absorb this grief - their own relationship with her mired in trauma itself - and start assessing their own legacies and trajectories through life. For one, René has a severe issue with hoarding, his modest Amsterdam flat resembling somewhere between an academic library and a landfill, and Rob’s more regular visits become a final opportunity for them to mutually settle their affairs, assisted by Tom’s intimate camerawork documenting it.  

In the first act, we wonder if Fassaert will maintain this observational and present-tense approach, but the brothers’ recollections provide exposition for their lives up to that point; specifically their own parents’ stormy relationship, and abandonment of them when Marianne left to become a model in South Africa. Left in an orphanage for the majority of their childhood, Marianne later picked them up with a new partner, with that extended absence making their own mother seem like genuine “stranger”. With their father Richard’s whereabouts unknown, René’s life and mental state is somewhat stable until he falls into homelessness, and his prolonged stay in an asylum, following a serious assault on the streets, is seen by Rob and his son as exacerbating the issues with self-sufficiency he already struggled with.

With the brothers’ advanced age, it’s at once surprising and perfectly understandable that they resisted locating their father. But Tom’s camera and a renewed sense of impetus take them on an amateur sleuth-like investigation of his mysterious fate, which awkwardly introduces scrutiny on their own genealogy as well. The editorial transition towards this new focus is slightly ungainly, but Fassaert ultimately succeeds with his candidness and emotional fearlessness, allowing us to reflect on family dramas we may have endured ourselves. His film delicately evokes how unconditional paternal love can still trigger contradictory emotions of secrecy and shame, making a family as fragile as it is robust.

Between Brothers is a Dutch-Belgian production, staged by Een van de jongens and Clin d’oeil Films. Its international sales are handled by Film Harbour.