A film about two gay neo-Nazis in a clandestine romance. It digs into the collective psyche of a Danish neo-Nazi group whose brightest recruit and biggest potential star, Lars, is a closeted gay man with issues.
Movie Review New York Times
Nicolo Donato’s melodrama “Brotherhood” digs into the collective psyche of a Danish neo-Nazi group whose brightest recruit and biggest potential star, Lars (Thure Lindhardt), is a semi-closeted gay man with masculinity issues. An up-and-coming army officer, Lars abruptly abandons the military when his expected promotion to master sergeant is denied because of rumors that he has made drunken passes at fellow soldiers. While he bides his time considering a course of action, his well-connected middle-class parents arrange behind his back for him to take an army post in New Zealand; he angrily rejects their interference.
The closest thing Lars finds to the army is a neo-Nazi group that harasses Pakistani immigrants, beats up homosexuals and idolizes Hitler.
“You’re just a silly boy,” sneers Lars’s mean, hard-bitten mother, when he admits his participation in a beating at a refugee center after the incident is reported in the newspaper. “There’s not an ounce of man in you.”
The film makes an important point about so-called brotherhood. Within the group, the confusion between rough, homoerotic fellowship among straight men and homosexuality (or the threat of it) sets up a paranoid electric charge. When Lars lectures the group about Ernst Röhm, the gay Nazi SA leader who was executed in 1934, they squirm in discomfort, and one weakly insists that Röhm may not have been gay.
With the exception of the leaders, Ebbe (Claus Flygare) and Michael (Nicolas Bro), a k a Fatty, who adopts Lars as his protégé, the brotherhood’s other members are mostly cowering, overgrown boys flexing their tattooed muscles and playing tough guy. In one comradely ritual they stand naked side by side at a dock, then plunge into the water simultaneously. Inside a rock club, the lines blur between dancing, fighting and groping. Picking fights and beating up people are the surest ways to gain respect inside this grade-school playground culture with its twisted ideology.
The inevitable happens when, under orders, the sullen, secretive Jimmy (David Dencik), one of the most vicious attackers in a gay bashing that opens the film, takes Lars as his assistant to Ebbe’s shambling seaside house for tutoring. Very quickly their suppressed mutual attraction explodes into a sexual relationship (Lars is the instigator) that is all the more intense for its being taboo.
When Jimmy’s gaunt, heroin-shooting younger brother, Patrick (Morten Holst, in a performance that is all quivering nerve endings and howling fury), catches Jimmy and Lars embracing, he is beside himself. Meanwhile Lars conceives of toughening the group’s platform by suggesting a public campaign that compares the price of assimilating Pakistani immigrants (millions) with the price of a bullet (pennies).
The movie never tells you how much Lars believes in any of this, or whether he is just trying to impress. The film’s biggest weakness is its failure to provide any explanation for Lars’s behavior, unless you want to blame the cliché of an overbearing mother and a weak father. In any case, Lars is not terribly sympathetic.
The strong ensemble acting lets you feel the quivering vulnerability under the characters’ thuggish facades. Beneath their spasms of violence and rowdiness lie buried sobs of fear and self-doubt. Until the very end, when the plot takes too slick a turn, “Brotherhood” is without sentimentality.
If you compared the two main characters with the cowboys in “Brokeback Mountain,” they would be ignoble versions of Ennis del Mar (Jimmy) and Jack Twist (Lars). Like their American counterparts, they barely know what to do with their passion. The feelings they do recognize with excruciating clarity are the fear and shame of discovery and certain punishment.
"The winning movie, 'Brotherhood,' takes a hard look at the neo-Nazi group that the leading character, Lars, joins after leaving the army. The group carries out raids on homosexuals, but Lars and his mentor in the group, Jimmy, begin a love affair that they try to keep secret. 'Brotherhood' is the first feature film by Nicolo Donato, a 35-year-old who previously worked as a fashion photographer. The jury handing out the awards was headed by Oscar-winning director Milos Forman."
A film about two gay neo-Nazis in a clandestine romance. It digs into the collective psyche of a Danish neo-Nazi group whose brightest recruit and biggest potential star, Lars, is a closeted gay man with issues.