Review: Opera-soaked drama in “My brothers and I”.

Summer by the sea somewhere in the south of France. The holiday has just begun but Nour, a thin guy at the age of 13, can not count on any vacation right away. His poor everyday life in a worn barracks is far from the tourists’ sunny existence. The family, mainly three older, messy brothers who still live at home, barely get their everyday life together.

Nour has one thing that makes him dream, a recording of Pavarotti singing “Una furtiva lagrima” (“A Stolen Tear”) from Donizetti’s “Love Drink”. Once, before everything broke down, his Italian father used to sing it for his North African mother. Nour lets arian go on repeat at home in the apartment. Maybe it can make his stroke-stricken mother wake up from the coma?

French “My brothers and I” mixes unsentimental social realism and that classic feelgood trope where fine culture makes the soul sing – regardless of previous cultural capital. During a municipal summer job at a school, Nour happens to be outside a hall where an opera singer has a summer course for children. Pavarotti sings “Nessum dorma” so it echoes out into the corridor and Nour is drawn in.

He may not be an immediate talent like Billy Elliot directly, but when he himself gets an unexpected chance to try his own singing voice, it turns out to be there. Uneducated, but clearly a possibility… That he is not particularly encouraged by his brothers is perhaps no surprise. They immediately force him to become a pizza delivery man.

The film is based on a play by Hédi Tillette de Clermont-Tonnerre, which the film’s director previously staged, but still manages to stand on its own two feet. Yohan Manca has a good feeling for the sun-drenched but rough environments (the film is filmed around Sète, among other things) and nicely balances all the feelings of sadness, aggression, competition and livelihood anxiety that characterize the family.

Judith Chemla’s spicy singing teacher feels a bit more like a desk construction, but the interaction between her and the shooting star Maël Rouin Berrandou becomes more and more complex the closer it gets to an evening at the opera towards the final. The story of the unequal brotherhood is the film’s highlight, they are a bit square in the beginning but a quartet that offers several surprising twists. “My brothers and I” is hardly unforgettable but a summery and flowing visual cocktail mixed with equal parts transformation and reconciliation.

See more. Three other films in which opera plays a role: “Diva – deadly intermezzo” (1981), “A room with a view” (1986), Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015).

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