🏆 GREAT MOVIE 🏆
« Брат » (original title)
IMDb 8.0/10 Rotten
Tomatoes 100%
18 | 1h 36min | Crime, Drama, Romance | Russia
Director: Aleksey Balabanov
Writer: Aleksey Balabanov
Stars: Sergey Bodrov, Viktor Sukhorukov, Svetlana Pismichenko
An ex-soldier with a personal honor code enters the family
crime business in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Brother (Russian: Брат) is a 1997 Russian neo-noir crime drama
film written and directed by Aleksei Balabanov. The film stars Sergei Bodrov
Jr. as Danila Bagrov, a young Russian ex-conscript. It appeared in the Un
Certain Regard section at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. After its release
on VHS in June 1997, Brother unexpectedly became one of the most
commercially successful Russian films of the 1990s and quickly rose to cult
film status throughout Russia. Due to the film's popularity and fan demand, a
sequel, Brother 2, was released in 2000. Brother 2 is notable for
having a significantly higher budget, placing more emphasis on action
sequences, and being set in Moscow and Chicago.
Magical.
Plot
In the autumn of 1996, Danila Bagrov (Sergei Bodrov Jr.)
returns to his small hometown of Priozersk following his demobilization from
the Russian Army after the First Chechen War. On his way home, he ends up in a
fight with security guards, after he accidentally walks onto the set of a music
video for the band Nautilus Pompilius. He is arrested and brought to the local militsiya
precinct. The officer in charge releases Danila on the condition that he will
find another job within a week. After Danila arrives home his mother, very
concerned for Danila, insists that he go to St. Petersburg to meet up with his
successful older brother Viktor and ask for his help.
Danila travels to St. Petersburg, but his attempts to make
contact with Viktor are unsuccessful. Instead, he wanders around the city. He
befriends Kat (Mariya Zhukova), an energetic drug addict, and "The
German" Hoffman (Yury Kuznetsov), a homeless street vendor whom Danila
helps after a thug attempts to extort him.
Unbeknownst to their mother, Viktor (Viktor Sukhorukov) is an
accomplished hitman who goes by the street name "The Tatar" but is
growing too independent and is starting to irritate his mob boss
"Roundhead" (Sergei Murzin). His latest target is "The
Chechen," a Chechen mafia boss who was recently released from prison and
now runs a market. Roundhead, who is unhappy with the amount of money that
Viktor demanded for the hit, orders his thugs to watch him in secret.
Danila eventually manages to find Viktor in his apartment. To
avoid exposure, Viktor passes his assignment to his brother, gives him money to
settle into the city, and then lies to him that the Chechen has been extorting
from him, and asks Danila to perform the hit. Danila asks the German to find
him a room in a communal flat in the city center. He then makes a makeshift
silencer out of a plastic soda bottle and an oil filter, as well as a decoy
firecracker out of a matchbox. Finally, he follows the Chechen and, despite the
latter's security, takes him out without being spotted. As Danila makes his
exit, Roundhead's thugs spot him and chase him. Making his escape, Danila jumps
into a freight tram and, despite being wounded in the abdomen, manages to kill
one of the pursuing thugs.
The tram driver, a woman named Sveta (Svetlana Pismichenko),
helps Danila escape. Danila later recovers and meets up with Sveta. Despite
Sveta being married, the two begin an affair. With the money given to him by
Viktor after the hit, he begins to enjoy St. Petersburg, gives his provincial
image a makeover, goes to a concert with Sveta, and manages to scare away her
husband. He meets up with Kat to go to a nightclub and then smokes cannabis in
an afterparty. The night ends with him sleeping with Kat.
Meanwhile, Roundhead is angry about losing one of his men and
the fact that Viktor used someone else to carry out the hit. He decides to draw
him into a combined raid. Once again Viktor, suspecting a trap, passes the job
to Danila. The two thugs raid the apartment, but their main target is away.
While they wait, in an apartment on the floor above, a party is taking place
with several well-known Russian rock musicians. A young radio director, Stepan
(Andrey Fedortsov) mistakes the raided flat for the party flat and is almost
killed by the thugs, who take him captive. Vyacheslav Butusov, the lead singer
of Nautilus Pompilius, makes the same mistake, but Danila instead follows
Butusov to the party above and relaxes in the friendly musical atmosphere.
After spending time at the party, he comes back downstairs and finds that the
thugs have just killed their primary target, and are about to do the same with
Stepan. Instead, Danila kills both thugs. Danila and Stepan drag the corpses to
the Smolensky Lutheran Cemetery, where the German helps Danila dispose of the
bodies.
Roundhead is furious upon finding out what happened. Instead
of going after Viktor, he decides to track Danila and intercepts Sveta's tram.
They later raid her apartment, where his men beat and rape her, and learn his
phone number, as well as his address. A henchman nicknamed "Mole"
ambushes Danila near his apartment building, but Danila manages to kill Mole.
Realizing that staying home is unsafe, he travels to Sveta's house and is
shocked at her state. He learns that Roundhead was responsible and realizes that
the only way they could have tracked Sveta was when he returned a phone call
from her home telephone to his brother.
At the same time, Roundhead raids Viktor's apartment and
forces him to call Danila at gunpoint, so that he comes to pick up his payment.
Realizing the depth of the situation, Danila goes back to the communal room
that he was renting, buys a shotgun from his landlord, converts it into a
sawed-off shotgun, and replaces the duck-hunting pellets with nailheads. At
Viktor's apartment, he takes out Roundhead and two of his henchmen and tells
the surviving thug to warn the rest of the gang that he will kill anyone who
hurts his brother. In reply, the thug tells him that it was Viktor who turned
him in (which Danila already suspected.)
Danila forgives his brother, gives him some of the money from
Roundhead's suitcase, and then tells him to return home and to work for the
militsiya. Danila decides to go to Moscow. He visits Sveta, intending to take
her with him, but her husband has returned and is beating her, demanding to
know where Danila is. Seeing Danila, he challenges him to a fight, but before
he can come closer, Danila fires a shot into his leg. Sveta rushes to her
husband and begins to treat his wound. Danila urges her to leave with him, but she
tells him to get out and never come back. He then meets up with the German,
converses with him about the influence of the city on its residents, saying
that everyone is weak here, to which the German replies that the city is an
evil force that drains the strength from those who enter it. Danila offers him
money, but the German declines, saying "What's good for the Russian is
death for the German." Before he leaves the city, he finds Kat to say
goodbye. She is indifferent to his departure, but he gives her money
nonetheless.
The last scene of the film shows Danila walking out of a
snow-covered forest. He hitches a ride to Moscow on a passing truck. As he
chats with the driver, the final shot is of the winter road stretching far into
the wilderness.
Production
The entire filming process took place within 31 days, on a
small budget of approximately $10,000. The actors worked for little to no pay,
and due to the low budget, they wore their own clothes on set throughout most
of the film. Some clothing was bought second-hand at flea markets, such as
Danila's sweater that he wears throughout most of the film. Most of the film
was shot in St. Petersburg, on Vasilyevsky Island. The first six minutes of the
film were set in Danila's hometown, which was filmed in Priozersk, with the
scene where Danila walks onto a film set taking place outside the walls of
Korela Fortress.
Svetlana Pismichenko, for her role as Sveta, learned how to
operate a tram. During the filming of the scene where Sveta's husband, Pavel,
is shot in the leg by Danila, the actor, Vladimir Yermilov, was wounded in the
leg due to an accident with the pyrotechnics. Before the filming of the last
scene, where Danila hitchhikes on a truck, the crew realized that none of the
actors knew how to operate a truck. Because of this, Sergei Astakhov, the film's
camera operator, played a brief role as the truck driver. The film was released
on VHS in June 1997 and premiered on television on 12 December 1997.