The musical career of two British punk siblings joined above the hip spirals out of control in the fake rockumentary Brothers of the Head. This first foray into fiction for Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (the American duo behind the “failed Terry Gilliam film”- documentary Lost in La Mancha), is appropriately moody and gets the music right, but becomes as incoherent and messy as the lives of the protagonists in the film’s second half, as the Siamese twins Tom and Barry Howe are unable to keep things together in a drug-induced frenzy of music, sex and death.

Based on the novel by Brian Aldiss (whose work also inspired Kubrick and Spielberg’s A.I.) and adapted by Tony Grisoni (Gilliam’s Tideland), Brothers of the Head betrays its literary origins with an effective scene early on in the film that fills in much of the brothers’ backstory in the blink of an eye without feeling implausible or rushed: The boys’ father became a widower straight after their birth and vetoed separation surgery for fear of losing his sons too. The narrative brilliance is not sustained however, even though some of the scenes from the 1970s do feel honest and truthful, especially an intimate scene in which the twins talk about whether, in an ideal world, they would like to be separated from each other or not. They are not sure, but one of them offers that if he ever fathered Siamese twins, he would “cut them like a slice of bread”.

The fake documentary (or “mockumentary”) style of course also warrants scenes in the present in which talking heads reminiscence about things past, but unlike the recent Russian space mockumentary Perviyje na lune (First People on the Moon), Fulton and Pepe’s contemporary scenes do not blend seamlessly with the “archival” footage. The main problem is that the talking heads do nothing more than state the obvious: with the benefit of hindsight, their impresario defends himself with a laughable “I never exploited anyone who did not want to be exploited”.

 

The freak show aspect of Tom and Barry’s punk act is of course what set them apart from the others and they know it, even to the extent that at concerts they let girls in the first row touch their shared piece of midriff. It also poses a problem for the audience of the film, who will (perhaps unconsciously) look for proof of the physical independence of both Harry and Luke Treadaway, the two actors who play the Siamese twins with a reckless abandon that they somehow know how to imbue with a sense of British vigour.

To this layman’s ear, the music in Brothers of the Head sounded perfectly convincing as period punk, though it is never so exceptional to warrant the overly long concert scenes that Brothers of the Head has plenty of. Especially in its second half, the filmmakers feel it is necessary for the audience to loose its way together with the doomed twins, which seems to be the wrong approach to matters. The secret of gothic-romantic artists is that they are able to portray emotions spinning out of control in such a virtuoso manner because these emotions have been recollected in tranquillity. Fulton and Pepe on the other hand, seem to have had no peace while putting their feature fiction debut together.

This film was screened as part of the 2006 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. 

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