Brothers

In Italy at the beginning of the century, two brothers, late adolescents, hang around their idleness and survive by selling their meager possessions drop by drop left by their father to their mother. They did not start working and did not have no intention. The days pass, vacant, between the Playstation and American films, the lousy deals and trips to the seafront. There they meet their cousin Nicola and his friend Claudio, two high school students who, left to their own devices, rub shoulders with world of the night, and its flaws and dangers. One thinks of Scorsese's Mean Streets. But Alessandro Tota's characters are rather descendants of the vitelloni and Fellini and the ragazzi of Pasolini. They grope for a way out of their lives, bumping into the bars of a cage invisible. The worst would be if nothing changed. Alessandro Tota nourishes the story with his memories but refuses the affectations of autofiction. Far from any formalism, the narration, simple and direct, favors the precision of the decor and the complexity of the characters. And if Fratelli chronicles an Italian youth, he also analyses the feeling deep and difficult, the strange and formidable bond, which unites a sibling group, biological or chosen. That by which it touches the universal.