Starring: Guy Pearce and Jean-Claude Dreyfus
Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud
Rated: PG
In the late 1980s, Jean-Jacques Annaud directed the impressive nature film, The Bear. That was its simple title.
This time his focus is on tigers but the title is Two Brothers. He wants us to look at the animals in comparison with human beings, to think of the animals like human beings and respond to their power, their might, their playfulness, their emotions and memories as if they were human.
The film is also a plea for the conservation of the tigers whose population numbers are drastically reduced from 100 years ago.
The tigers are best and the location scenery is impressive too. The humans, on the other hand, led by Guy Pearce as an adventurer trader, are less well rounded in characterisation than the tigers. In fact, most of them are more than a little shifty – greedy villagers who want to get rid of the tigers who prey on their animals, French officials who feel that they are lost in a distant outpost, circus people who could not care less about their animals, a prince who concludes that to be as impressive as his father he has to be cruel and organises a kind of colosseum combat in a local arena between the two tiger brothers.
The appeal to the cruelty and curiosity of the human spectators is rather alarming.
But it’s the memory of the magnificent tigers that lingers.
