Next to documentary images from the brothers’ house, archival materials from Kazakhstan can be also seen in Staroń’s film – these are fragments of films Mieczysław shot during his trip around the Soviet Union. We see images from Siberia, family meetings, summer games. In this documentary, art created by both brothers is a reflection of their characters and dispositions. Visual “notes” taken by Mieczysław show him as a man immersed in reality. He is focused on what is near, watches the world closely, and doesn’t need anything else in life. Alfons is his opposite – he turns to the past to remember better times, or to the future, planning his exhibitions and catalogues, daydreaming. His paintings are signed with this longing – longing for the past and for a good future.
Staroń faultlessly points out the differences between them, but shows them in a discrete manner. Many directors would turn Brothers into a documentary comedy about two eccentric, wonderfully different gentlemen. It’s even easier to imagine a film about the Kułakowscy brothers as a classic documentary, in which talking heads speak about the protagonists’ life, archival photos illustrate consecutive chapters, and all the elements together form a superb story about an individual caught in the course of history. About the escape from the gulag, their life in Kazakhstan, their return to capitalist Poland.
Archival photo from the film "Brothers", directed by Wojciech Staroń, 2015. On the picture: Alfons and Mieczysław Kułakowscy. Staroń is not interested in grand history nor in sentimental journeys into the past. He is interested in the “here and now”, in small, everyday rituals and unobtrusive observations. In one of the scenes, the disabled Mieczysław slowly puts on a warm sock. The old man sits on his bed and, centimetre by centimetre, puts it on his foot with a long pair of forceps. Staroń watches this scene closely, lets it go on. But there is nothing intrusive in his watching, no pornography of the old.
We start to understand the meaning of this scene a minute later, when Alfons helps his brother put his trousers on. One disabled old man aids the other, who is even more disabled. Brothers is a film about a difficult love of two men who have spent their entire lives together and now, together, face death.
