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Review by Harvey Karten
3 stars out of 4
You can spend $6000 to go on photo safari in Tanzania or
Kenya, living in basic accommodations, dining (ugh) on zebras,
mosquitos at no extra charge. If that's OK with you, that's your
problem. I'm content to see safari-style films that give you far
better photos than you could possibly take yourself and put you
right up close to the animals you'd have to strain to see amid
the traffic jams at Serengeti. Check out "Two Brothers," for
example, Jean-Jacques Annoud, who directs and co-wrote the
script, with Alain Godard, is fortunate in having Jean-Marie
Dreujou as his first-class photographer. Dreujou gets up close to
the subjects which, fortunately, are tame as a Siamese cat and
like those felines are even photographed in part in
Thailand–also Cambodia. The action takes place during the
1920's in French Indochine (now Vietnam, Cambodia and
Laos). The picture is not only a Discovery Channel offering writ
large but has stuff to say about environmentalism, colonialism,
rapaciousness and cultural differences among Southeast
Asians, British and French. (The French all speak English for
the benefit of kids ages six to eight who will love the movie
though they may not yet know how to read subtitles if they are
products of our public school system.)
Annaud, whose 1989 feature "The Bear" deals with a cub who is
orphaned and forced to fend for itself until it finds a new
protector in a giant Kodiak targeted by hunters, is in his element.
With a storyline that could be heartily approved by Rudyard
Kipling, Arnaud takes us to a land or big adorable cats, evil
hunters and greedy mercenaries, even to London where to the
surprise of an auctioneer nobody bids for ivory tusks but great
interest is shown in illegally taken booty from Cambodia and
surroundings.
The principal subjects aside from handsome and manly Guy
Pearce in the role of hunter-author Aidan McRory are tiger
siblings Koumal and Sangha. During the infancy their father is
killed (shades of Bambi) after which one infant, Koumal, is sold
to a circus which abuses him into performing tricks while the
other, Sangha, is taken by a rotund French official Eugene
Normandin (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) to be a pet for his son. When
the two cats escape and head back to the jungle–where author
McRory insists they cannot survive having never learned to
hunt–the tigers are said to be dangerous to the villagers:
McRory is asked to shoot the two animals, but since the film is
targeted to the small fry, he cannot bring himself to pull the
trigger.
The dialogue is clunky and choppily edited, but who cares? The
eponymous characters and not the caricatured apparatchiks are
what the kids come to see. The two brothers meet the
challenge, the shy brother bound to draw the oohs and ahs of
the crowd particularly when in a game of hide and seek with the
young lad, he hides in a bookshelf among the stuffed animals.
If your child is motivated to ask you where the feline pups come
from, unfortunately in this PG movie the sex scene is merely
hinted at during the beginning of the action following which
Dreujou shyly draws his camera aside.
To his credit Annaud lets the tigers speak for themselves and
avoids dialogue during various segments of the pic, except
when he inevitably suggests that the cats have a range of
human emotions and can communicate their fears, their
kinships, and their love for humans through an assortment of
catcalls. The movie becomes repetitive at times, the story
difficult to follow, but the jungle photography and particularly the
closeups of Koumal and Sangha are spectacular.
Copyright © 2004 Harvey Karten
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