PARTISAN REVIEW
relatively simple dialectics of
Duet for Cannibals,
one couple (Francesca
and Arthur Bauer), solidly if bizarrely united, metaphorically devour
and then regurgitate another, younger couple (Ingrid and Tomas),
whose life together is failing.
Brother Carl
also shows two couples–
one already failed (Lena and Martin, divorced five years before the
film's action begins) and another who continue together in uncon–
summated estrangement (Karen and Peter Sandler). At the beginning
of
Brother Carl,
Karen and Peter are in somewhat the same sterile,
discontented state of semifailure as the younger Ingrid and Tomas.
(Karen is near forty and Peter is in his early thirties, while both
Ingrid and Tomas are in their middle to late twenties.) But the two
couples are not simply left to intersect with each other, las in
Duet for
Cannibals.
For they are not alone.
On
each side there is a "child," a
child who is too angry or too wounded to speak. Martini has his genius
protege, who used to dance. The Sandlers have their y?ung daughter,
whom all sounds interest except words. The
introduct~bn
of that re–
fusal- that pathos and pain incarnated by the "child" - generates
the more complex interchanges of this couple story. While nobody in
Brother Carl
(unlike
Duet for Cannibals)
is shown as able to make love
physically, the characters do try to care for each other. Some have
already surrendered their capacity to give and to receive, however.
Their exchanges of energy are not, basically, "cannibalistic" - only, for
the most part, futile or misplaced. Lena, who is strong and decent and
deserves to live, makes the mistake of attaching her life to the struggle
to reclaim love - and loses. Karen, who is weak and 3elfish and hardly
"merits" anything in her own right, is rewarded.
The thematic resemblances between
Duet for Cannibals
and
Brother Carl,
such as I can detect now, only confirm my pleasure in
what I understood earlier to be the differences between the two films.
What counts most for me about
Brother Carl
is that it takes a step
beyond
Duec for Cannibals:
the spatial relations within the shots are
subtler, the editing is more intelligent, the use of sound is more sophis–
ticated, and the dialectic between the characters is more complex. It
is a handsomer film (in terms of lighting, set design, suppleness of the
camera) than
Duet for Cannibals;
it is also, probably because my
feelings are more exposed in it, sometimes clumsier. In this sense,
Brother Carl
stands in somewhat the same relation to
Duet for Can–
nibals
as my second novel stands to my first novel. Both
The Benefactor
and
Duet for Cannibals
have in common a considerable emotional re–
ticence, a recoil from pain that masks itself as humor. In
Brother Carl,
as
in
Death Kit,
pain is more visible; no one is being ironic at the ex–
pense of his or her own suffering. I don't mean that I prefer the second
