Steve B
This is what I would call a Ficumentary - a fictional documentary. This is a very believable and engrossing story with stunning performances by Luke and Harry Treadaway. Their performance is both extreme and very subtle. I've never seen or felt so much from a simple glance. And the movie is so believable I went and looked the main characters - Tom and Barry Howe - up on the Internet convinced that they were real.As the movie progresses, and thank to the main actors Luke and Harry Treadaway, you can see the characters self-destructing before your eyes. The weigh of their lives bares down on them with ...well... unbearable weight.Both Luke and Harry Treadaway have gone on to do other separate movies. Harry Treadaway, as an example, was the lead in the movie "City of Ember".A fastinating and unique movie experience, and especially so for music fanatics.
PaulLondon
I suppose that a film about co-joined twins who become punk rock stars in the mid-70's has to have something going for it and, indeed, this partially successful film did keep me gripped for most of the journey. As with most rock films, melodrama is the order of the day and this is no exception as the boys face physical abuse, drugs and rock star blow-out in the grand tradition of the likes of Hazel O'Connor in that other punk drama Breaking Glass.There is much to like in this film including the stylised direction which veers away from the mockumentary format into more creative territory from time to time. There are some excellent ideas at play here; including scenes from an 'unfinished' Ken Russell film.The problem is that this film is screaming out to be great little cult film but it never quite succeeds; perhaps its the lack of humour and the ease with which it lapses into cliché. Mostly though I think the tired 'mockumentary' format is what ultimately works against this film. Interesting and worthwhile but ultimately not the success it should and could have been.
Chris Knipp
Experts can outline for you the elaborate history of rock docs and mock rock docs. Suffice it to say that Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's Brothers of the Head goes them all one better with the kinkiness of the fantasy world it creates. It's about Seventies Siamese-twin boys from a remote area in England joined at the lower chest who're taken up by an impresario looking for something special: a musical freak show. Isn't that redundant, in the era of Lou and the Velvet and Ziggy and the New York Dolls? Well, no, because we've never seen a movie about Siamese twins before and we'll never see one about Siamese twin rock stars again. Real twins Harry and Luke Treadaway play Tom and Barry Howe, respectively, with incredible enthusiasm and scary charm. Joining them is a large band of prosthetic conjoining flesh, hidden at first but successively more boldly revealed in public performances when the initial audiences thought them a fake. Probably none of this would work if the two actors didn't look like the healthiest, happiest, prettiest English boys you could imagine. When they do the intimacy and the conflict involved in such a scene, the Treadaways know whereof they speak. The heart of the movie is watching them together in action.The opening scene shows a lawyer tiptoeing into a damp corner of the northeast English coastline to get the dad of the two boys to sign a contract. This turns out to be a clip from "Two-Way Romeo," an unfinished fictional film about the boys' lives by Ken Russell, who talks about the "project" on screen. A down-on-his-luck manager, Zak Bedderwick (Howard Attfield), we learn, found the actual twins and had them trained musically to develop a novelty rock band.Later we alternate between successively creepier cuts from Russell's opus interruptus (in his version one of the boys gets a fetus growing out of his stomach) to the "real," also unfinished, documentary done in the early to mid-Seventies by American filmmaker Eddie Pasqua (Tom Bower) about the boys' shaky beginnings -- they're lodged in a big empty mansion where their rough working class musical manager Spitz (Stephen Eagles) beats Barry, the more obstreperous twin, to keep him in line -- and ultimate rise and hectic meltdown of hysteria, emotional conflict, sex, drugs, and inevitable, obligatory breathless self-destruction.Later after their talent-less-ness is patiently trained out of them and Tom masters guitar and Barry does lead vocals, they sing together and get so much into the whole performance thing (Roeg's Performance may come to mind--something of the same hothouse surreal sensuality is evoked) along with the high of public appearance-cum-substance abuse, the twins are having a mad, wild good time.. But the more they enjoy themselves -- and this is what undercuts the creepiness: the sense of pure joy of self realization -- the more being forever conjoined becomes both raison-d'être and curse for the pair.The film's ultimate guilty pleasure is absorbing a sense of the many complex levels of physical and psychic interaction Siamese twins (especially in such an intense lifestyle) would have, which the real twin actors are able to play convincingly: Tom and Barry go from finishing each other's sentences to erotic acts we can only imagine. They eventually become a manic pre-punk pair in a band known as Bang Bang, which plays in successively larger clubs, as the boys graduate from chain smoking to drinking to lines of coke and pills, feverish sex and psychosexual warfare.An attractive woman, Laura Ashworth (Diana Kent, Tania Emery) comes along to do an academic treatise on the pair as a study of "the exploitation of the handicapped." To quiet her the manager hires her on with the crew and she falls in love with Tom. Once they're part of the music scene all kinds of pleasure come the boys' way along with mood swings, especially from the always unstable Barry, that challenge the power of their togetherness. A surgeon speaks about the unfeasibility of separating the two, especially now they're grown, since they share a single liver and Barry has a congenital heart defect; but later investigation reveals that Laura indeed was looking into the possibility of surgery and contacting this very surgeon, no doubt with a view to having Tom all to herself. She was banished for her pains. A sequence perhaps suggestive of Frank's C--ck--er Blues about the early Stones on tour hints at the obvious point that if one boy of the pair had sex, they both would, and the natural pattern was a polymorphous foursome. There's freaky sex for you. All of which brings back the Seventies as vividly as any almost-real fantasy could.Kink in this case would especially include that sub-genre of twin fantasies, and this one constantly tickles out thoughts of the queerness of glam rock, (the whole Iggy/Ziggy thing) -- or, as Pepe said at a festival Q&A, "When you strap two good-looking 20-year-olds to each other, a certain subtext starts to emerge." Tom and Barry are perpetually hugging and touching each other because they're conjoined. They're adept at moving together and you even see them running and cavorting on an English lawn.You can laugh at the genre but with the sleazy-beautiful mock-Seventies images and the twin actors' natural verbal and physical volatility, Fulton and Pepe really pull you into this story, which was drawn from a novel by Brian Aldiss (who is a character played here by James Greene as the author of Kurt Russell's movie) and adapted for the screen by Tony Grisoni.The images are ably handled by Anthony Dod Mantle, who shot 28 Days Later, Dogville, and Manderlay but gets to play with styles more here, producing footage that combines current talking heads with beautifully faked Seventies-style footage from the presumably unfinished documentary.If you like kink, you like the Seventies, and you like proto-punk, this is the cult mock rock doc for you.
mail-2635
Directors Fulton and Pepe get full marks for the rare feat of making a film where the fake-verite style is not a distraction and takes a back seat to the story and characters.The film is very deftly crafted, especially considering the subject matter. After all, the film is about conjoined twins being sold to a music promoter who wants to make them into pop stars. (The mind boggles at the heavy-handed way such a story MIGHT have been told.)And, yes, there is an actual meat and potatoes story here. The fact that these brothers are conjoined is key to the plot, but mercifully, it is NOT a one-note gag that the whole film is hung on. The directors made many interesting and ultimately daring choices, such as shooting the film in a verite style. Unfortunately, this will beg obvious (but ultimately irrelevant) comparisons to other fake-verite films with musical themes.Another interesting choice was shooting the performance scenes in what appear to be live takes, rather than having the actors lip sync to a studio recording. This seems like an insane choice because of the extra casting and logistic hassles. You'd have to find actors that could actually play, get them to practice together and then who knows if they'll be a decent band. But they pull it off. The music is authentic-sounding pre-punk--an undeniably raw and vital soundtrack. (I'll buy the soundtrack for sure. They could even put this band on tour and I'd go see them.) So, here's to insane choices.There are modest, surreal sequences between some scenes, but the directors know when to say when on this. The art-house crowd (and the stoned) are thrown a bone. But normal people will not be left rolling their eyes or checking their watch. These parts don't feel like art for art's sake. The casting is amazing. Using two different actors to play the older and younger versions of certain characters is yet another interesting choice. A few of the actors bear such a striking resemblance to one another that you may find yourself scanning the credits to see if they're related.This is the first narrative film by these two directors and I wholeheartedly encourage them to make many more films.
