Issue 83 (2024) |
Aleksandr Zolotukhin: Brother in Every Inch (Brat vo vsem, 2022) reviewed by Åsne Høgetveit © 2024 |
Brother in Every Inch, the second feature film by Russian director Aleksandr Zolotukhin, is a visually capturing and emotionally resonant exploration of brotherhood and the human cost of war. We might all experience being pulled in different directions, and then we ultimately have to choose: How much are we willing to sacrifice in order to fulfil our dream? The happiness and wellbeing of others, perhaps our loved ones? Or the happiness and integrity of ourselves? These questions lie at the core of Brother in Every Inch, as the film follows twin brothers Mitia and Andrei Berezin, played by real-life twins Nikolai and Sergei Zhuralev, training to become Russian military pilots.
In some aspects, Brother in Every Inch is a continuation of Zolotukhin’s first feature, A Russian Youth (Mal’chik russkii, 2019), in that it presents us with a story of young men trying to find their way in an adult world that is new to them, and understand who they are and can be, within the framework of a military system. In A Russian Youth, Zolotukhin explored how the young man Alesha has to learn to fit in as a soldier, and a human being, in what we now call the Great War, or World War I. In Brother in Every Inch Zolotukhin tells the story of a pair of twin brothers training to become Russian military pilots. This story brings us closer to our time, but also to the director’s own lived experience. Zolotukhin is the son of a military pilot; thus, he had a unique insight into the system and the culture he is describing in this film. The film was supposedly shot at the actual academy where his father was trained (Zolotukhin in Karpova 2022), and it is hard to imagine any other filmmaker having the connections to pull that one off.
Between the official international premiere of the film at the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival on 13 February 2022 and the Russian release on 3 March 2022, Russia launched the large-scale invasion of Ukraine. Thus, over the course of those three weeks, the view of who Russian soldiers are and what they are capable of is likely to have changed in the minds of many. Still, it is always important to be reminded of the humanity of the individual soldier, and that the decision of war is made by those in power.
The story unfolds during the final phase of the cadets’ training, before their final assessment. The twin brothers Mitia and Andrei look identical, and share the dream of flying. However, their performances in the air and in the classroom are not identical. Andrei is glowing with confidence, he is well on his way to mastering his aircraft, he gets along with his fellow cadets and makes his girlfriend laugh when he is flirting with her. Even when he gets the wrong answer to a teacher’s question, he does not seem too bothered. Rather, he seems intent on figuring it out himself. Mitia is his opposite in most of this. He outperforms his brother in the classroom, but for the most part Mitia appears much more reliant on Andrei than the other way around. Their teacher proclaims that if combined, they would make up a great cadet. We follow the brothers in a series of events: on the airfield, in the classroom, in the barracks, sneaking off to meet Andrei’s girlfriend, Lera (Aleksandra Shevyreva), recovering injured classmates and cleaning up a crashed aircraft, clearing a swamp area of birds before burning it, and of course, we follow them in the cockpit of the fighter aircrafts in which they train. We see how the brothers care deeply for each other, and how their non-verbal communication almost reaches telepathic levels. Their pain is evident as they realize that their love for one another is not enough to get them through the academy; quite to the contrary, it is holding them back.
Zolotukhin is clever and elegant in the way he conveys his story through visual cues and details. Through a series of events loaded with visual and verbal cues, it is made evident that Mitia simply is not fit for a career as a military pilot, perhaps as a soldier altogether. As Andrei is making the final preparations for his graduation flight, Mitia visits the military hospital to take the tests that ultimately shows he is unfit. We do not get access to the physician’s assessment of Mitia, but as he leaves the hospital, he helps a nurse out with a severely wounded soldier, who tears a piece off Mitia’s uniform in desperation. This can be interpreted as an omen: nothing good will come of Mitia insisting on a military career—it will rip him/the brothers apart.
The film’s climax is both heartbreaking and uplifting, as the brothers are forced to choose between their individual ambitions and their love for one other. When it becomes clear that Andrei has the option to graduate and Mitia does not, Andrei chooses to stay with his brother, saying “I will go home with you”. In this shot, their inseverable connection as twins is underscored by way of a set of wired headsets. The brothers are using one earpiece each, after talking to their mother on the phone.
Maybe most striking is the color palette of the film and its extreme brightness. Most daylight scenes are dominated by blinding, white sunlight. In war/army films, the colors are typically extremely vivid, or more of a grey and brown hue. The brightness, in combination with the documentary-style camera technique by Andrei Naidenov, creates a poetic cinematic language well suited for the unassertive, yet dramatic story. On the other hand, the use of music is more conventional for military and aviation films. Zolotukhin makes use of scores by Richard Wagner and unmistakable French horns, accompanying the flying sequences and his many shots lingering on the fighter aircrafts.
In an interview with Barbara Wurm in connection with the film’s inclusion in the Encounters Program of the 72nd Berlinale, Zolotukhin talks about his wish to explore the moment when love and care cause friction and dilemmas in a relationship, as opposed to hate or lack of empathy. For him, the most interesting relationship in this respect was that of twins (Wurm 2022). Still, it is also possible to read the twins as a metaphor for often contradictory aspects of an individual personality. Individuals have the capacity of being both confident and insecure, they have attractive and unattractive sides that do now want mutually contradicting things. It is in this vein that the scene where Lera clearly rejects Mitia’s advances on her can be read: she finds the outgoing, fun and confident Andrei attractive, not the cautious and clumsy Mitia, even though they look the same. In the scene, Lera sits between the brothers in her van and Mitia leans in and begins to caress and kiss her, while her attention is on Andrei whispering in her ear. She has to turn around and give Mitia a somewhat puzzled, but unmistakably rejecting look, to stop his advances on her.
The film has been labelled an anti-war film (Karpova 2022; Wurm 2022). War is not mentioned, but its presence is of course constantly lingering in the background with the images of fighter planes in the sky. The emphasis of the cadets’ training is on the technical aspects of flying, and there is one sequence of an aircraft armed with missiles. This happens immediately after Andrei has passed his assessment and before he is invited to continue his career path as military pilot. Rather, the direct threat to the cadets is posed by their own inadequacy, for example when Mitia loses consciousness during a flight, and as we are told through the teacher who stresses the importance of knowing how to calculate to make a safe landing. The outside threat is posed by the wild birds nesting in the swamp near the airfield: the crashed aircraft had a collision with a bird, it turns out. To eliminate such threats, the cadets need to study for themselves: after all, even your twin cannot save you when you are alone in the cockpit, and the birds have to be chased away before their habitat is burnt. While on that job, Mitia gets lost in the swamp but manages to escape the flames and fumes, only to be scolded by his superior upon return before the other cadets.
The brothers struggle to keep their bond and care for each other—their humanism—, in a system that requires them to separate in order to succeed. Ultimately, they choose love, peace, and real brotherhood rather than the army and warfare, solitude and the inauthentic, conditional brotherhood of the military.
Åsne Høgetveit,
Independent scholar
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Works Cited
Karpova, Irina. 2022. “Interv’iu: Brat vo vsem,” The Blueprint, 4 March.
Wurm, Barbara (host). 2022. “Brother in Every Inch: Berlinale meets… Alexander Zolotukhin,” YouTube Channel of Berlinale – Berlin International Film Festival, 10 February.
Brother in Every Inch, Russia 2022
Color, 80 minutes
Director: Aleksandr Zolotukhin
Scriptwriter: Aleksandr Zolotukhin, Mikhail Tiazhev
DoP: Andrei Naidenov
Editing: Tat’iana Kuz’micheva
Production Design: Elena Zhukova
Sound: Ivan Gusakov
Cast: Sergei Zhuralev, Nikolai Zhuralev, Aleksandra Shevyreva, Mikhail Klabukov
Producer: Andrei Sigle, Mary Nazari
Production: Proline Film
Premier: 13 February 2022 (Berlin), 3 March 2022 (RF)
Aleksandr Zolotukhin: Brother in Every Inch (Brat vo vsem, 2022) reviewed by Åsne Høgetveit © 2024 |