Way Out West VIOLENCE, GENRE AND THE SISTERS BROTHERS
The Sisters Brothers (2018) is the eighth feature by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard, but it’s his first in the English language, and the first to take him outside of France. It’s also a change of pace, in terms of both tone and genre. Audiard is best known for making grim, contemporary dramas set among marginalised members of French society, like his acclaimed prison epic A Prophet (2009); the trauma-etched Rust and Bone (2012), in which Marion Cotillard plays a marine-park trainer who loses both her legs; and Dheepan (2015), his portrait of a Tamil immigrant pushed too far, which won the Cannes Film Festival’s highest prize, the Palme d’Or.
But The Sisters Brothers is a western – and a comedy. It’s based on a 2011 novel by Patrick deWitt, a Canadian writer whose surreal investigations of style and genre (the Gothic with 2015’s Undermajordomo Minor; the upper-class-society play with 2018’s French Exit) unfold as absurdist comedies. The Sisters Brothers tells the tale of two siblings who work as bounty hunters journeying across Oregon and California in 1851, with much of its text dedicated to the pair’s comic bickering.
Audiard was recruited to be the film’s director by one of its stars, John C Reilly. Reilly and his wife, producer Alison Dickey, optioned deWitt’s book before it was even published, in 2011. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix star as the titular siblings: the latter playing the drunken, firebrand older brother, Charlie Sisters; the former, the more sensitive, sweet-natured Eli. The brothers work for a shadowy figure called the Commodore (Rutger Hauer), who sends them on a job to
