
Two Brothers: Drama. Starring Kumal, Sangha and Guy Pearce. Directed by
Jean-Jacques Annaud. (PG. 115 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)
Jean-Jacques Annaud directed the 1989 masterpiece, “The Bear,” a
narrative film for which he got brilliant dramatic performances out of a
couple of grizzlies, an astonishing feat. So any time Annaud wants to point
his camera at animals, it’s worth looking his way. His new film, “Two Brothers,
” the story of a pair of baby tigers, benefits from the cuteness and
magnificence of its animal stars and from Annaud’s patience, his willingness
to wait for the right shot, the right expression.
It’s in many ways a beautiful film, but it’s also a troubled one. The
trouble comes from Annaud’s inability to fulfill a couple of opposing demands:
1) He is simply too much of an artist and an animal lover not to tell the true
story of tigers, a tragic tale by any measure; 2) At the same time he’s
constrained by what audiences, including children, expect from a movie
involving animals. So the result is schizophrenic, an uplifting film that’s
truly depressing, a movie about cruelty that tries to be fluffy.
He gives himself additional trouble by co-writing, with his frequent
collaborator Alain Godard, a bifurcated script that follows two story lines
most of the way. The most fascinating footage in “Two Brothers” involves the
animals interacting with each other. But most of the film has to do with each
tiger interacting separately with disparate sets of human beings, and worse,
with human beings talking with each other. Annaud seems no more interested in
these people than we are.
“Two Brothers” is set in Indochina in the early part of the 20th century
– if you want to make a movie at a time when there were still lots of tigers,
you have to go back that far. A seduction scene starts it off. A female tiger
rolls on her back, inspiring a male to chase her, though when he catches up to
her, she tries to scratch his face. You know, just another Saturday night in
the wild. From there, cut to a shot of the scenery, and next thing we know Mom
and Pop have two irrepressible and adorable cubs.
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At this point, “Two Brothers” is at its best, and it seems like a gift to
be watching yet another Annaud film like “The Bear.” We see the gamboling cubs
playing with their mother’s tail, getting into scrapes with other animals and
wrestling each other. We get close-ups of their concerned little-old-man-like
faces. When a party of humans shows up, led by a hunter named McRory (Guy
Pearce), the film maintains the animal perspective. In one scene, McRory plays
a gramophone record that echoes into the woods, and, with no extra effects,
Annaud persuades us to hear the music as the animals hear it — as static
and noise, as alarming and anti-nature.
But soon the cubs are separated, one sent to a circus and another to the
dungeon of a local potentate. The focus switches to the human characters, who,
aside from McRory, are drawn in broad strokes. As the picture notes in a
postscript, there were 100,000 tigers in the wild a century ago, but today
there are only 5,000. True to that reality, “Two Brothers” depicts a catalog
of abuses. Annaud’s heart may be in the right place, but who wants to watch
animals being terrorized for two hours?
He makes matters worse when he tries to offset this with sentimentality,
making the tigers positively Lassie-like in their ability to understand human
language, and cuddly in a way that has nothing to do with real tigers. But the
value of these creatures has nothing to with our ability to anthropomorphize
them. Their value is intrinsic. Annaud knows this, but two-thirds into the
movie he’s flailing, looking for a way to be honest and yet not send everyone
out miserable. He can’t quite find it.
– Advisory: Animal foreplay and inter-species violence.
E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.

