‘Brother’: Toronto Review

Dir/scr: Clement Virgo. Canada. 2022. 119 mins.

“We are not safe.” Francis is not yet a teenager, but already the streetwise older brother to the gangly, diffident Michael knows enough about the world in which he lives - Scarborough, on the eastern sprawl of Toronto in the 1980s - to realise his mother is wrong to tell him that there is nothing to fear. The lives of two brothers, taking in timelines which span several decades and a devastating death, are threaded together in this supremely confident and affecting drama from Canadian director Clement Virgo. It takes in sexual awakening, a magpie’s haul of disparate musical influences, and delves into the experience of growing up black and male in a place where masculinity is measured by which end of the knife you are holding; where guilt is an assumption in every encounter with the police.

What’s particularly striking is just how elegantly the film’s three main timelines are woven together

This is a rich and satisfyingly textured piece of storytelling from Virgo, who adapted the screenplay from a novel by David Chariandry. A prolific and accomplished television director, Virgo co-wrote and directed the multi-award-winning CBC miniseries The Book Of Negroes, and also directed episodes of The Wire. On the film side, Virgo’s debut feature Rude premiered in Cannes Un Certain Regard in 1996. Brother should do much to cement his reputation as a cinema director of note. Following its premiere at TIFF, it screens in the official competition at the BFI London Film Festival. With its sweeping scope and richly realised cultural backdrop – the story takes place among the first and second generation West Indian community in Toronto – this should be a title of considerable interest for arthouse distributors. While the picture may not match Moonlight’s awards success, Brother could connect with a similar audience.

In the role of Francis as a young adult, UK actor Aaron Pierre (best known for Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railway) is a formidable force. His commanding physical presence seems to fill up the screen. And it certainly leaves very little space for Francis’ more sensitive younger brother Michael (Lamar Johnson, excellent), who seems to be constantly a few steps behind and trying to catch up. There’s not so much a rivalry between them however, more a sense that Michael is struggling and failing to fit himself into the space that his brother inhabits so effortlessly.

It’s a handsome picture, shot in expansive widescreen and with a colour palette of aqua blues, gold and ochre which bring a Caribbean flavour to suburban Canada. What’s particularly striking though is just how elegantly the film’s three main timelines are woven together. Francis and Michael as kids, left with a strict list of rules while their single mother (Marsha Stephanie Blake) works shifts as a nurse; the brothers at school, negotiating, with varying degrees of success, the swaggering adolescent egos and macho posturing of their school mates; Michael ten years later, all at sea caring for a mother who has been broken by grief. The film doesn’t just cut between the story strands, it almost creates a dialogue between them, a kind of call and answer.

Musical influences and the film’s terrific evocative sound design are similarly woven together, literally in one scene in which Jelly (Lovell Adams-Gray), Francis’s close friend and, it is hinted, his lover, DJs in a competition, cutting up hip hop with Jamaican reggae. And the dual use of Nina Simone singing Jaques Brel’s ’Ne Me Quitte Pas’, early in the film and again at the very end, touches a nerve the first time around and fully tears our hearts out on its second appearance.