Brother (1997 film)

Brother (Брат, translit. Brat) 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 ex-conscript who becomes embroiled with the Saint Petersburg mob through his criminal older brother. 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.

Plot
Danila Bagrov (Sergei Bodrov Jr.), a recently discharged Chechen War veteran, is insisted by his mother that he travel to Saint Petersburg to seek out his successful older brother Viktor, whom his mother is confident will help him make a living. He does, and there he befriends Kat, an energetic drug addict, and "The German" Hoffman, a homeless street vendor whom Danila helps after a thug attempts to extort him.

Unbeknown to their mother, Viktor is an accomplished hitman who goes by the street name "The Tatar", working for a St. Petersburg mafia boss called "Krugliy" (Russian for "round"), His latest target is "The Chechen", a Chechen mafia boss who was recently released from prison. Krugliy, who is unhappy with the amount of money that Viktor demanded for the hit, orders his thugs to watch The Chechen, so that he can kill The Tatar to avoid paying him.

Danila eventually meets up with Viktor. 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, asking Danila to perform the hit, and he agrees. While settling in, Danila boards a public bus and when an Armenian man refuses to pay the fare, Danila steps in and forces him to pay at gunpoint. Danila makes a pipe bomb and blows up The Chechen, and Krugliy's thugs spot and chase him, but he manages to escape by jumping into a tram and killing one of the mobsters, the tram driven by a woman named Sveta.

After Danila recovers, he decides to meet up with her, despite her being married to an abusive husband.

Meanwhile, Krugliy is angry, and decides to draw The Tatar into a combined raid. Viktor, again suspecting a trap, passes the job to Danila once more. 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. A young radio director, Stephan, mistakes the raided flat for the party flat and is almost killed by the thugs, who take him captive. There is a party in a different apartment with members of Nautilus Pompilius, and lead singer Vyacheslav Butusov mistakes this apartment for the one and is turned away by Danila. Bored of the waiting, Danila decides to go to the party above. Some time afterward, he comes back to find the thugs killed their primary target and a hostage, and are about to do the same with Stephan, but Danila kills them.

Krugliy, 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 him, Danila's CD player stopping Mole's bullet. Danila travels to Sveta's house and is shocked.

At the same time, Krugliy raids Viktor's apartment and forces him to call Danila at gunpoint, urging him to come over. Realizing the depth of the situation, Danila goes back to the communal room that he was renting and buys a shotgun from his landlord. He modifies the shells from birdshot rounds to cut nails. At Viktor's apartment, he takes a mobster hostage and kills Krugliy 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.

Danila forgives Viktor and gives him some of the money from Krugliy's suitcase, telling him to return home and to work for the militsiya. Before leaving for Moscow, he visits Sveta, and upon finding her husband beating her, he shoots him in his leg before leaving, to which Sveta says she doesn't love him anymore for such an action. He then says goodbye to Hoffman and Kat, before hitching a ride to Moscow on a passing truck.

Cast

 * Sergei Bodrov Jr. – Danila Bagrov
 * Viktor Sukhorukov – Viktor Bagrov (voiced by Aleksei Poluyan)
 * Svetlana Pismichenko – Sveta
 * Maria Zhukova – Kat
 * Yury Kuznetsov – "The German" Hoffman
 * Irina Rakshina – Zinka
 * Sergei Murzin – Roundhead (voiced by Aleksandr Stroev)
 * Andrey Fyodortsov – Stepan
 * Igor Shibanov – Militiaman
 * Andrey Krasko – Owner of the raided apartment
 * Aleksei Poluyan – "Mole" the bandit
 * Igor Lifanov – One of Roundhead's bandits (voiced by Aleksandr Bashirov)
 * Tatiana Zakharova – Danila's and Viktor's mother (voiced by Nina Usatova)
 * Sergei Debizhev – Music video director (voiced by Valery Kukhareshin)
 * Konstantin Anisimov – Music video security guard (voiced by Viktor Bychkov)
 * Anatoly Gorin – Sveta's roommate (voiced by Viktor Bychkov)

The film also features brief appearances from several Russian rock musicians:
 * Vyacheslav Butusov, as well as other members of Nautilus Pompilius
 * Sergey Chigrakov
 * Nastya Poleva
 * Band members of Aquarium
 * Band members of Kolibri

Concept
According to director Aleksei Balabanov, the concept of Brother was born from an old plan to make a film about bandits and musicians, since he often talked to both. In this concept, music was to play a leading role. Looking for a suitable soundtrack, Balabanov chose the group Nautilus Pompilius, since he had been friends with vocalist Vyacheslav Butusov since they both lived in Sverdlovsk.

The draft script contains differences from the film, for example:
 * Sveta and her husband Pavel Yevgrafovich are fond of sadomasochism. During filming, Balabanov rewrote these scenes to feature domestic violence, but later explored the theme of BDSM in his next film, Of Freaks and Men.
 * Some characters are missing, such as Kat, the Chechens who did not pay for the tram fare, and various minor characters.
 * Danila makes a bulletproof vest from CDs sewn together.

Filming
The film was shot in thirty-one days. According to producer Sergei Selyanov, about 10,000 US dollars were spent on filming. Many actors worked for a small fee or for free. According to Svetlana Pismichenko, she was compensated a thousand dollars for her role; for her role, she was specially trained to drive a tram. The knit sweater worn by Danila was bought by the artist Nadezhda Vasilyeva at a flea market for less than forty rubles. In the last scene, the truck driver who picked up Danila was played by the film's cameraman Sergei Astakhov. The Nautilus Pompilius that Sveta and Danila attend was actually a concert of the band Chizh & Co. According to Pismichenko, drunken fans at the concert almost trampled over her and Bodrov in the crowd.

Themes
According to producer Sergei Selyanov, one of the main themes of Brother was to document the transition from the "communal system of life" under socialism to the "individual responsibility" of capitalism. He noted that "in the 1990s, the individual had a chance to realize himself to the fullest" and that even family ties lost meaning. Balabanov wanted to show the importance and value of lost connections, yet Danila single-handedly confronted all the obstacles in the world around him.

Literary critic and publicist Viktor Toporov, studying the draft version of the script, noted that it is connected with other Balabanov films, both previous and subsequent, by various details.

"Balabanov's integrity becomes especially obvious when reading the scripts he wrote, the internal connections between which become something like a single circulatory system.

[...]

One amazing thread sticks out from the script of Brother, and by pulling it, almost half of Balabanov's work can be unraveled. Danila's 'mature' girlfriend, the well-worn tram driver, turns out to be an avid bottom here: she likes to be tortured and she keeps in the closet - and readily uses on herself - almost the entire arsenal of SM. Which, on the one hand, ties her together (forgive me this pun) with both the 'porn divas' from Freaks and the daughter of the district committee secretary from Cargo 200, and on the other, in purely Fassbinder style, turns her into the long-suffering Mother Russia! Exactly so, that is, no more, but no less."

Film critic Anton Dolin describes Danila as "a person who has fallen out of context, living in a time of great change, but who has ceased to feel History." In his opinion, Danila needs relatives and friends, but he either doesn't find them or he doesn't find in them what he was looking for.

"A character who is so close to the viewer, living in the world of a film - the main film, if not the only one in the entire 1990s, that comprehensively described and summarized that turning point decade. And, of course, the main film for Balabanov. It still doesn’t have the postcard popular style of Brother 2 nor the hard guignol of Cargo 200, but it no longer smells of the esoteric thoughtfulness of Happy Days and The Castle. But there is something here that Balabanov would later define as 'fantastic realism,' where unvarnished documentary borders on extreme conventionality. Tough, clear, dashing, frank, naive, poetic, musical, not containing a single unnecessary frame or word. With amazing acting work, its organic nature and energy that goes far beyond the concept of 'acting work' - like De Niro in Taxi Driver or Huppert in The Piano Teacher. Perfectly meeting the definition of a 'masterpiece'.

[...]

Brother is either a tragedy or a comedy of the loneliness of a hero who dreamed of loved ones, but ended up with his pistol in the Lutheran cemetery in the company of a German and a director who is scared to death of him. He seems to have a presentiment that new times are about to come, in which there will be no place left for either the author or the actor. And the hero will be appropriated and called 'brother' by the trivial thieves from Krugly's gang - those who unsuccessfully tried to overthrow him in the film. In fact, Danila Bagrov did not have any brothers. He was the only one."

Twenty years after the film's release, Viktor Sukhorukov noted both the heroism and inconsistency of the character of Sergei Bodrov. "The need for heroes always exists, starting from epics and fairy tales. What is a hero? This is the main horse in the trio. That dark horse that pushes this chariot, cart, wheelbarrow, britzka. Do we have one today? No. A hero must be born. Not through ideology, but through resistance, through a clash of positions.

[...]

Danila Bagrov served his fatherland on a certain front, then returned and decided to help his brother. Each of us has such a mixed up contradiction of good, evil, love, hatred, strength and weakness. In this contradiction, we must find a hero who will unite the weak and the strong - and say: 'Yes, you can live with this! And not get lost, and get rich, and be strong, and be saved.'"

Journalist and critic Yuri Saprykin defined Danila's personality as a blank slate, which contains the names of his closest relatives, several common moral truths ("the weak must be protected"), several innate social instincts ("I don't like Jews very much") and the name of his favorite band ("Nautilus Pompilius"). Saprykin characterizes the Bagrov's calm shooting as "the fastest movement towards the goal, in which all ethical corners are cut; the simplest solution for any problem, he is like a bullet that flies in a straight line."

"Danila aims at a businessman with the same readiness as at an ordinary bandit, and at a negligent husband; with the same thoughtless readiness he would shoot a random passer-by if he were in the line of the bullet. Class enmity is absent in his simple value grid, where the only important division is friends and foes, and except for the Tatar, who is always a friend because he is a brother, this division is always established by chance, according to the situation."

Saprykin also agrees with the author of Balabanov's biography, Maria Kuvshinova, regarding the role of the German, who he see as a kind of alter ego of Balabanov.

Release
Brother was selected for screening at a number of Russian and international film festivals, where it won many awards. The festivals include, among others:
 * Cannes Film Festival, Un Certain Regard
 * Chicago International Film Festival
 * Sozvezdie
 * Torino International Film Festival
 * Trieste International Film Festival

The domestic premiere took place at the St. Petersburg Cinema House in 1997. After attending the premiere, critic Sergei Dobrotvorsky said that Brother would become "the main event of the country." The film was released on VHS in June 1997. It premiered on television on 12 December 1997 on the NTV channel.

On 24 March 2022, the film, along with its sequel, was re-released in cinemas. Vesti.ru noted that "the first day of the film's re-release brought in 7 million rubles, which for the current situation is an excellent result. Foreign releases earn much less in a weekend than Brother earned in a day." The film's producer, Sergei Selyanov, admitted that "We didn't make any predictions, but the result exceeded our wildest expectations. We were impressed that viewers who had seen both films 10-20 times still came to the cinema. The films seem to be legendary, unsurprisingly, but it’s still amazing." As of 3 April 2022, the film's re-release collected 59.5 million rubles or 577,000 US dollars with an audience of 219,000.

Critical response
Brother has an approval rating of 100% on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 5 reviews, and an average rating of 7.63/10.

Track listing
Other songs featured in the film are "Max Don't Have Sex With Your Ex" by E-rotic, "Coz I Luv You" by Slade, and "Giamaica" by Robertino Loreti

Sequel
Following the film's success, Balabanov initially planned to make two sequels: the second instalment was to take place in Moscow and the third in United States. During the writing phase, however, he abandoned this idea and combined the second and third parts into a single sequel instead. Brother 2 is notable for having a significantly higher budget, placing more emphasis on action sequences, and being set in Moscow and Chicago.

In September 2022, the publishing house Bubble Comics released a comic collection, Brother: 25 years, for the 25th anniversary of the film. The collection contains stories about Bagrov and other characters, some from the films and some new. One of the artists of the project is Andrey Vasin, who worked on the comics Igor Grom and Besoboy.

Legacy
In 2016, producer Sergei Selyanov noted that in the 2000s and 2010s, there was no character in Russian cinema who had as strong an image as Danila Bagrov.

In the 2018 music video for her song "90", the Russian singer-songwriter Monetochka reenacts scenes from Brother.