Film Shapes

I saw The Sisters Brothers a couple of weeks back at the Paradiso as part of the French Film Festival . This is the first English language film by Jacques Audiard and only his eighth film as director. Cards on the table time - this geezer is one of my favourite active directors (along with Denis Villeneuve). A Prophet , The Beat That My Heart Skipped and Rust and Bone are among the best films made in the past 20 years. So by these measuring sticks, The Sisters Brothers comes up short, but not by too much. The film charts a typical Western cinema journey. Character A has something or has done something and Character B has to hunt him down. The Quest type of plot as outlined by Christopher Booker and repeated ad nauseam throughout film (and story) history. Here though, it coalesces quite nicely with another of Bookers plots, the Voyage and Return. Character A, in this case, is Riz Ahmed's chemist Hermann Warm (and later, Jake Gyllenhaal's John Morris). Character B here ...