Metro Cinema Society: Brothers of the Head

Brothers of the Head

UK 2005, 93 min, 35mm, Dir: Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe

Brothers of the Head follows a pair of conjoined twin brothers who are plucked from rural obscurity, groomed into rock stars and launched on an unsuspecting music scene as the "next big thing." The abusive manager, slicked-back impresario, two-faced journalists, groupies galore, booze and drugs and more booze and more drugs fill in the gaps. Yet the film operates on a totally different level than these motifs would suggest for two reasons: pitch-perfect and intimately detailed direction, plus two astonishing, ferocious performances from real-life twins Luke and Harry Treadaway. You can taste the insanely close, almost erotic intimacy of the boys. When they become aware of the manipulations around them, their bursts of anger make for extremely chilling cinema indeed. Directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe are erudite students of film and film language; Lost in La Mancha, their scathing documentary about Terry Gilliam's abandoned "Don Quixote" project, is one of the more telling tomes about the perils of the artistic process. Their powers are used here to create a runaway locomotive of a narrative that jumps all over time, space and genre to create a prismatic look at these two impossible, perfect characters from a history only half-imagined. (Noah Cowan, TIFF) Adapted from a Brian Aldiss novel by Tony Grisoni, who wrote the screenplays for Tideland, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Gilliam's unmade Don Quixote film.

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