The Sisters Brothers

A Canadian novel, filmed in Spain and Romania, co-scripted and directed by a French director, not surprisingly casts an acerbic eye on an American cultural tradition. Here it’s the toxic masculinity mythologized in the American Western mythology. 

The theme starts in the title. The brothers begin as their family name, Sisters, but are driven by their abusive father into a patricide, then into the hired guns’ violent cycle of deaths in life. Their colleague John Morris is similarly driven from gentleman to outlaw by his abusive father. The Commodore is the visible father figure, despatching his young men to kill until they are killed. 

Extending the theme of brutalized sensitivity, the town of Mayfield is owned and tyrannized by a gruff-voiced, masculine woman, Mayfield. If we didn’t know the actor is named Rebecca we’d take her as a man in drag. 

The Sisters’ mother has also done very well running the family homestead on her own, ready to blast away any attacker and even her own sons if they are coming only to hide from the law. For all her firmness, her home preserves the woman's touch.

The sons’ homecoming is an explicit homage to the opening and closing shots of Ford’s The Searchers. But unlike John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards, these gunslingers can come in from the cold frontier desert; they can recover their civilized roots. 

Her sons personify delicacy abused, a feminine nature struggling to survive their violent pattern of life. Eli is the more obviously sensitive, as he treasures a woman’s gift shawl, chafes at his murderous career, and reaches out to others — the prostitute, the scientist, brother Charlie — with a reflexive tenderness.

But Charlie may still be the more sensitive. After all, he carries the burden of patricide. He finds an outlet in the bravado of his drinking and killing, but he still whimpers in his sleep, even after pretending to, to trick Eli. He also pays the greater price, limb wise.  

The dark-skinned scientist Herman Warm is the most feminine male character here. The utopian society he plans to establish — in (of all places) Dallas — is sensitive, generous, caring, free of profiteering and power systems. Its appeal not only converts Morris from his mission but drives him to accept his father’s inheritance, to dedicate to that cause.   

Morris and Eli share another sign of the creeping civilizing of the wild macho west. They are both introduced to the toothbrush, a radical encroachment upon their macho strut and breath.

Is “toxic” too strong a term for the Western’s macho spirit, under attack here? Not when you attend to the most dramatic metaphor in the film. Herman Warm’s system is to pour a corrosive acid into the water, then stir it, to expose the gold nuggets beneath. But that acid also eats away the flesh, if the men aren’t fast enough to wash it away. Charlie loses an arm and a hand to it, Warm the flesh on his legs and finally his life. 

America’s macho swagger may have delivered it some fortune, but only at the cast of flesh, blood, humanity.The lesson sticks.           
      There are no African Americans in this film’s wild west, though there’s a possibly racist sneer in citing one “Sanchez.”  The delicate Warm is played by a Pakistani rapper, Riz Ahmed, possibly evoking contemporary Islam. Director Jacques Audriard frames his vision of contemporary America very specifically here. His subject isn’t the racial divide but the high cost of violent male privilege — to the nation as well as to the trapped individual soul.