Jacques Audiard's 'The Sisters Brothers': Who says Westerns are passé?

Brothers by blood. Sisters by name. Watch the official trailer for #TheSistersBrothers. pic.twitter.com/AJNqMTgluO

— The Sisters Brothers (@SistersBrosFilm) May 24, 2018

The narrative follows the ride of two mercenary brothers, Eli (Reilly) and Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix) in their pursuit of the brilliant chemist and gold prospector Hermann Warm (Riz Ahmed) and his unexpected sidekick John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal) around 1850 in the American West. While some recent Westerns have come in for reproach – like Scott Cooper’s “Hostiles” (2017) for its patriarchal bent and Ed Harris’s “Appaloosa” (2008) for its classicism – Audiard’s latest effort has managed to make a real Western that steers clear of the old clichés.

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Real Western? With “The Sisters Brothers”, Audiard preserves the genre’s central traits. Film critic Robert Warshow described them in 1954: “As guns constitute the visible moral centre of the Western movie, continually suggesting the possibility of violence, so land and horses represent the movie’s material basis, its sphere of action.” While Audiard admits he has “no interest in the landscape” (which, for that matter, was filmed in Spain and Romania), the horses – “a chore to film” – and the violence – which he nevertheless wanted “very detached” – are on full view in “The Sisters Brothers”.

And while the cast is 100 percent male, the film is far from devoid of femininity and sensitivity. These brothers are not named “Sisters” for nothing and a number of female figures cast a shadow over the story. “The Western is not a feminine genre, but there is an ambiguity throughout the film. Actually, I humanise my population of viriloids,” smiles Audiard, who recently made headlines in Venice slamming the lack of gender diversity at film festivals.

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