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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
A great film that gravitates from satiric parody to compelling family drama, 24 Dec 2006
Unconventional, forceful and even kinky in places, the family depicted in the German drama Agnes and his Brothers (Agnes und seine Brüder) are living on the edge, mired in dysfunction, reveling in their eccentricities. These brothers are sometimes perverse and darkly funny, sometimes wistful and yearningly romantic as writer-director Oskar Roehler spins his unique saga of modern German dysfunction.
Green Party politician Werner (Herbert Knaup) is successful professionally but his personal life is a mess. His socialite wife Signe (Katja Riemann) is bored and has gone off him sexually and he's not getting on with his smart aleck, pot cultivating teenage son.
Hans-Jorg (Moritz Bleibtrau) is a timid librarian who spies on gorgeous women through a hole while they are on the toilet and attends sex addict meetings at night that do little to curb his libidinous appetite. Ironically the most grounded and secure of the brothers is Agnes (Martin Weiss), their little brother who now dresses as a woman, works as a dancer in a trendy nightclub and refuses to be molded into a homemaker role she's clearly not cut out for.
The crux of the film is their relationship with their hippyish, aging father who molested Hans-Jorg as a boy and which may explain why Hans is so sexually dysfunctional as he trolls through the stacks purving at scantily clad supermodels who seem a bit out of place in a library. Meanwhile, Werner has a nasty habit of defecating on the floor when he talks on the phone, while his son videotapes him.
Each of the brother's stories is equally compelling, yet paradoxically it is the Agnes of the title who is given the least screen time. The film explores the brother's longing for love and romance and a somewhat sensible life, free of all the dysfunction that they have inherited from their father. The only love these three men can count on is the unconditional love for one another, though at least one of them does not even seem to notice.
The performances from Bleibtreu, Knaup and Weiss are incredible with each actor doing a great job of presenting each of character's pent-up angst, giving their characters force and depth; their lives are just like firecrackers waiting to explode.
Weiss is suitably brittle and delicate as the gentle, fragile dancer Agnes; the sexy Bleibtreu is absolutely sensational as the introverted Hans-Joerg, a man driven to the brink by the thoughts of sex, and there's Knaup as Werner, the crude Green Party politico, who has more than reached the end of his tether with his exasperated wife and unruly son.
Agnes and His Brothers is a slick, ambitious movie that doesn't always nail all the many moods and themes, but it's always gripping as it lays out a dark portrait of the German middle-class. Indeed the film has a type of gloomy and subversive quality that is fairly unique in movies today. Mike Leonard December 06.
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