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Comme des Frères - Film Review

     Buddy-Comedy-Road-Movie-with-added-cathartic-death is perhaps an underpopulated genre of film. Between drunken stumblings and snap decisions to drive to Corsica, your three lead males from different corners of life have to calm down every now and then just enough to remember your lead female, tragically deceased. Don't worry, this isn't a spoiler- you'll find out as much from AlloCine's page on the film. Point is, you might not get much more from the film itself.
     Bitter and sweet are put very, very close together in this coming-of-age-slash-putting-feet-on-the-ground tale  of three friends united by their love, platonic or not, of Charlie (Mélanie Thierry), the vibrant sister-mother-lover of every Frenchman's dreams, with whose funeral the film opens. So our three musketeers Elie, Boris and Maxime (Nicolas Duvauchelle, François-Xavier Demaison, Pierre Niney) then decide to leap into a car and take the holiday they'd always planned with their fourth musketeer, and cue the road-movie soundtrack. Some really stunning cinematography makes up for the fact that we're really relying on music and moody driving to tell most of the emotional story, these being men, and all that.
     What sets this film apart, and probably what won director Hugo Gélin a major film festival award as well as six other nominations, was the backwards storytelling which brings the film to a close. Throughout their travels, flashbacks show us the friendship each of the men had with Charlie, each time progressively further and further back in time, until we reach the night they met. Awkwardly standing at a party, each staring at Charlie, they seem a long way from Corsica and a long way from the deep connection that now holds them "like brothers".

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