THE SISTERS BROTHERS

"The Sisters Brothers" is a revisionist western directed by a Frenchman but it feels like a classic; the idiom may be 'modern' but it's a film that will fit in any list of great westerns thanks to a terrific script, a terrific cast and the direction of that Frenchman, Jacques Audiard and I haven't even mentioned the superb cinematography of Benoit Debie.

The brothers of the title are a couple of paid killers and their story runs parallel with that of Jake Gyllenhaal's more urbane killer as they all journey west in pursuit of a gold prospector who allegedly stole from the man who is paying them to hunt said prospector down. It's the kind of western Anthony Mann or even Budd Boetticher might have made but given a nice post-modernist twist by our knowledge of the western as a genre and of how cinema itself has developed since the western first appeared. The plot may be actually quite thin but is still sufficiently different from most westerns and Audiard does get terrific performances from his cast.

The title roles are played by Joaquin Phoenix as the laconic, laid back brother and John C. Reilly as his more thoughtful and seemingly slower sibling and both actors do some of the best work of their careers in these roles while Gyllenhaal underplays beautifully the other hunter who befriends his prey, a superb Riz Ahmed. Here we have a quartet of great performances that far outweigh a lot of what is winning Oscars these days.

The pace of the picture may be slow, as slow at times as the brothers hunt for their quarry, but it captures beautifully a sense of the past that many contemporary westerns have denied us. These towns and their inhabitants look very much like the real thing and the landscapes reek of authenticity even though the whole film was shot in Europe. Should we ask more of a genre that has been around as long as cinema itself? The pleasures you get from watching a movie like "The Sisters Brothers" may be manifold but mostly they are the pleasures you get from watching a film you know is head and shoulders above most of what else is out there. See this.