Love's Brother

Reviewed by PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * *)


Jan Sardi makes his debut as director with a charming but unremarkable love story which explores part of his own family history.

Sardi, the Oscar-nominated writer of the screenplay for Shine, setsLove's Brother among the immigrant Italian community - which seems to be the entire population of a 1950s town in rural Victoria. Gino (Adam Garcia) and Angelo (Giovanni Ribisi) are twentysomething brothers who share everything except physique. Gino is Rock-Hudson handsome and Angelo, well, thanks to his clownface makeup he looks like Bela Lugosi playing Marlon Brando in The Godfather and he talks like Tom Waits sings.

Everyone is anxious to get the hapless Angelo married off and he keeps sending letters to Italy trying to ensnare one of the many proxy brides of the age, the women who arrived in Australia having already married a man they had never seen.

Repeatedly rejected, he resorts to a subterfuge that has "disaster" written all over it - he slips a pic of the good-looking Gino into his letter of proposal. The gorgeous Rosetta (Warner) takes her vows, takes ship and takes fright when she sees she's married her true love's brother.

The rest should be predictable, but the film throws you off the scent because, although it's Gino's story, Ribisi's Angelo keeps hogging all the attention with a mannered and actorly performance. It's bad enough that it's greedy, but worse, it holds us at arm's length and Angelo's internal life never becomes real to us.

Sardi has a writer's eye for the telling detail - the matchmaker's blood-red fingernails riffling through a card-file of prospects, the bride preparing her wedding finery or exploring the mysteries of male toiletries. The film is at its most assured in these quiet moments. But the story is ponderous and the film has some major holes in the plot. There's also that irritating convention where people write and receive letters in Italian and discuss them in heavily accented English. Gino's girlfriend Connie (de Santis) has been raised in Australia but sports an accent that sounds vaguely Iranian.

It's a handsome film - cinematographer Andrew Lesnie who won the Oscar and Bafta for the third Rings movie sees to that, but only at moments does it involve us.

CAST: Giovanni Ribisi, Adam Garcia, Amelia Warner, Silvia de Santis

DIRECTOR: Jan Sardi

RATING: G

RUNNING TIME: 98 minutes

SCREENING: Lido