Brothers of the Head

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
2005

Brothers of the Head
Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe
UNITED KINGDOM, 2005
English 90 minutes HM Colour/35mm
Production Company: Potboiler Productions
Executive Producer: Tony Grisoni, Lisa Marie Russo
Producer: Gail Egan, Simon Channing Williams
Screenplay: Tony Grisoni, based on the novel by Brian Aldiss
Cinematographer: Anthony Dod Mantle
Editor: Bill Diver
Production Designer: Jon Henson
Sound: Tim Barker
Music: Clive Langer
Principal Cast: Luke Treadaway, Harry Treadaway, Tania Emery, Sean Harris, Bryan Dick
Production: Potboiler Productions

A raucous ride through a burning flash of glory in seventies British rock music, Brothers of the Head is an utterly uncharacterizable tour de force from two of the world’s most interesting emerging directors. Neither truly fake documentary nor fly-on-the-wall tour film—although it tips its hat to both those genres—the film perhaps feels most like underground horror, with characteristic physical expressions of psychological trauma in abundance. This should come as no surprise, as sci-fi guru Brian Aldiss authored the novel on which it is based. It also absolutely, definitively has the coolest soundtrack of any movie this year: a sweltering hybrid of Small Faces-styled classic rock and early, hyper-angry UK punk.

The film follows a pair of conjoined twin brothers who are plucked from rural obscurity, groomed into rock stars and soon launched on an unsuspecting music scene as the “next big thing.” The abusive manager, slicked-back impresario, two-faced journalists, groupies galore, booze and drugs and more booze and more drugs fill in the gaps.

Yet the film operates on a totally different level than these motifs would suggest for two reasons: pitch-perfect and intimately detailed direction, plus two astonishing, ferocious performances from real-life twins Luke and Harry Treadaway. You can taste the insanely close, almost erotic intimacy of the boys. When they become aware of the manipulations around them, their bursts of anger make for extremely chilling cinema indeed.

Directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe are erudite students of film and film language; Lost in La Mancha, their scathing documentary about Terry Gilliam’s abandoned Don Quixote project, is one of the more telling tomes about the perils of the artistic process. Their powers are used here to create a runaway locomotive of a narrative that jumps all over time, space and genre to create a prismatic look at these two impossible, perfect characters from a history only half-imagined.
—Noah Cowan