EDINBURGH 06 (pt2) : 'Brothers of the Head' (2005) / 'God Told Me To' (1975)

Thursday, 24 August 2006

BROTHERS OF THE HEAD ¦ UK 2005 ¦ Keith FULTON & Louis PEPE ¦ 91m (timed) ¦ 6/10

At last year's Edinburgh Film Festival one of the big British movies was Stephen Woolley's Brian Jones biopic Stoned. This year's closest equivalent is arguably Brothers of the Head, which chronicles the brief but remarkable career of The Bang Bang, a raucous mid-seventies band built around a unique gimmick: their frontman was in fact "frontmen" - twins conjoined at the chest, ‘Siamese' style. If you've never heard of The Bang Bang - or of Two-Way Romeo, Ken Russell's unfinished feature about the brothers, or of the legendary unreleased footage of the band's debauched private lives by legendary US documentarian Eddie Pasqua - you needn't feel too dense. Because The Bang Bang, Two-Way Romeo and Eddie Pasqua are fictions: Brothers of the Head is the latest in the increasingly-popular faux-docu genre, and is based on the novel of the same name by British sci-fi doyen Brian Aldiss (who cameos at the start of the film, billed as "The Author.")

Stitching together selections from both Russell and Pasqua's "footage," directors Fulton and Pepe follow the brothers from their windswept, isolated childhood at L'estrange Head in Norfolk (hence the title), to their being signed up by a shadowy impresario (in a scene which has Russell rather niftily quoting a famous moment from Citizen Kane), to their rapid education as musicians (the brothers were selected for their biology, not their talent), to their brief, meteoric status as the Next Big Thing - and their equally sudden, mysterious demise... Though the mock-doc format is becoming a little tired just now, Brothers of the Head is sufficiently offbeat to command and retain our interest.

And despite some moments of deadpan comedy, Fulton and Pepe craft an intriguingly dark rock-world mythology that gives even a Stoke Newington pub gig the feel of a quasi-occult ritual - what might transpire were Nik Cohn to collaborate with Iain Sinclair. But just as often as we're drawn into the brothers' intense, essentially impenetrable relationship - the one a bit of a Nick Drake, the other more like Nick Cave - we're jolted by the picture's uneven attention to period detail (The Bang Band, who may remind younger viewers of The Libertines, are essentially a New Wave outfit half-a-decde avant la lettre) and to the conventions of the three movie genres they're supposedly reproducing: perhaps they should have hired Russell himself, plus D A Pennebaker, then handed the whole thing over to (say) Nick Broomfield.

GOD TOLD ME TO ¦ USA 1975 ¦ aka Demon ¦ Larry COHEN ¦ 87m (timed) ¦ 5/10
God Told Me To - perhaps better known by its alternative title Demon - is a headspinningly bizarre and baffling policier with a startling theological twist. It's set in a mid-seventies Manhattan in which ordinary citizens are going on kill-crazy rampages, then citing divine "inspiration" when quizzed by the cop in charge of the investigation, Peter Nicholas (Tony LoBianco). But as Nicholas delves further into events, he finds answers which hit extremely close to home... Cohen proves a bad fit to bring his own delirious screenplay to the screen: his direction is perfunctory at best, amateur-hour at worst, with a tendency to amp up the score so that the dialogue (which is often annoyingly quietly-spoken) is almost drowned out. And that's quite a problem when the story is already convoluted and confusing. Several set-pieces retain our interest - especially the one-scene cameos by Richard Lynch and Sylvia Sidney - but by the end Cohen has spiralled off into the realms of hokey self-indulgence, leaving us distinctly nonplussed behind.

Neil Young

seen 24th August 2006
Brothers of the Head at Cameo cinema (press show)
God Told Me To at Filmhouse cinema (public show in 'They Might Be Giants' retrospective; paid £4.20 with press discount)
Edinburgh Film Festival

Edinburgh 06 index page

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