Reviews & Ratings for
Pau i el seu germà More at IMDbPro »

2 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
poetic film not to be missed!, 22 June 2001

Author: josep from new york

One of the best surprises at Cannes! A film for all ages....with powerful images and powerful perfomances by david selvas, nathalie and the always good Marieta Orozco. Hopefully it will make it to the united states because we can all learn from the monster of Pau y seu germa!

j

0 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
There is poetry in everything.........., 31 May 2003

Author: Keith F. Hatcher from La Rioja, Spain

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

..........and that is the trouble with poetry (Miroslav Holub)

And there may even be poetry in images, which is the trouble with images. `Pau i el seu germà' is a film which has to be seen with all the senses, not with sight alone. Even so, with all senses at full stretch, if anything adds up to any sense, let me know. Visual poetry without overmuch dialogue and with negligible story-line could quickly fall into abstract anarchy, where telephone wires tremble in the wind, she yanks at the bread with her teeth at breakfast-time, he plays in the snow completely naked, and the woman who does pulls the lavatory cistern chain, all splendidly filmed amid cuckoos calling in an isolated Lleida (Lérida) village high up in the Pyrenees. If any of the above might be considered `spoilers', this would imply that the film has something to tell. It has not. Rather, it is an incursion – I should say `attempted incursion' – into abstract cinematography of the style usually adopted by lesser known Swedish, Hungarian and Japanese directors.

Supposedly, Alex dies and his brother Pau goes back to the village of their childhood to relive, or simply rake up, memories.

However, the telling of anything going on forces you to try guessing as you have to jump unsequentiated gaps between the incoherent succession of scenes. The film has tried to be so intellectual, amid a few more or less realistic scenes and disjointed dialogues, which jump from mountainside scenes to making love in the barn, bed-time dialogues, machines carving a new road up to the village, and a few other `crazy' scenes resulting from them drinking wine and smoking a few joints, that in the end only porphyrious unentangling could ever hope to connect and tie up the odds and ends floating about before your eyes. The photography is magnificent.

Well, I suppose you could opt for watching the Memphis Grizzlies: at least Pau Gasols is authentic Catalonian and in the end something happens – somebody wins and somebody loses.

In `Pau i el seu germà' nothing happens, and neither the director nor the audience wins or loses

6 out of 26 people found the following review useful:
Boredom Catalan style, 24 December 2001

Author: jotix100 from New York

A few years ago, an old Spanish film director, could be Garcia Berlanga, but I'm not sure, was quoted in a section of Fotogramas, the film magazine, saying something like this: "The worst American movie is better than the best Spanish one." Watching "Pau i el su germa" proves that theory.

That this film was a selection for Cannes 2001, only proves to what extent that hype-fest has become a laughing matter, since it is, at best, a very mediocre venue to peddle films.

This is a film to be seen when the viewer hasn't slept for a few days. Or, better yet, it must be seen by patients in a sleeping disorder clinic: They'll be cured of insomnia forever!

Obviously, Mr. Recha has received funding for this "master-piece" from the unsuspecting folks of Catalunya's Department of Culture, otherwise, it is very difficult to know how did he get any bank to give him the money to complete it.

The first clue about how boring it's going to be is the sequence where the camera follows Pau into the train and proceeds to spend about 5 minutes photographing those every day passengers that are unfortunate to be in the way of Mr. Recha's camera.

After that, this genius, decides to show us for about 10, or 15 minutes the apartment houses that line the highway, and the trip into the mountains. Had it been important to the story, or added something to the overall result, one could even go along. It only gets worse when he shows the actors interacting with one another. They seem to be acting in different films, at the same time. Nothing makes sense.

It is no wonder that people kept leaving the theater! At the end, a few people were asking each other if they had "got" the meaning, since it appears that no one had a basic idea of what had been the point because Mr. Recha decided to play, perhaps, a joke on all of us, unsuspecting spectators, to this enigma of a film.

The wise old director was right!

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